Brother Karson’s Jean Jacket

Every time I throw my new jean jacket over my shoulders
I feel like I’m putting on my cape.
But then also I feel like I’m honoring my old friend Karson
who wore a jean jacket for about 25 of the 35 years
that I knew him-
who passed away last year.
Tough trucker who I beat up two times on the clock
at our first job together when we were teenagers.
My roommate at age 17 who ate two bags of popcorn
every night for dinner.
Brother who’s father I helped bury, literally-
“In my family we don’t leave till we’ve personally shovelled
all the dirt back into the grave.”
So many years of getting Chinese buffet together.
Staying at his house on the pig farm where he worked
on my drive back from ceremony up in Santee
(sometimes I’d leave my window down and then
my car would smell like farm hell for days).
Seeing him out there supporting me on my first year of Sundance,
dropping when I pierced because of what he
sympathetically felt.
I wasn’t ready for him to go, thought he had a couple more
decades left like I assume I’ve got myself.
Every time we’d get together we’d tell stories
about the shit we’d gone through;
we had 30 years of shared memories,
one of the rarest treasures I’d learn as time went on.
I flew back for his funeral, buried him beside his dad,
helped shovel the dirt.
Days hardly get any sadder than that.
Saw him in his coffin and wanted to help him out of it,
hop on his Harley with him and cruise back to Columbus
circa 1999 and grab a big old foamy beer together,
laugh and cry about those good old days
in our apartment, when we blazed with the purest,
most down-and-out, cigar-smoking teenage joy.
He’d told me since we were kids that he wanted Metallica’s
Enter Sandman to play at his funeral and I cried
so hard when that damn song came on as he’d requested.
In his soul was a design that had him standing up and protecting
his nerdy, outcast friends and his character lived that design
through and through.
He will always be remembered as a guardian
who put his friends above all the things that most men fear-
few can tell the story of their life and say the things
he could’ve, say how true they stayed to the God-given
design of their soul.
He’s been gone a year now but I know that brother
will always be looking out for me, wearing his
boots and his jean jacket, his beloved furball cats
right there with him.
When you get older you realize how rare true friends really are
and you feel the ones you got like members of your own blood-family.
Karson’s like that.
And now I got my own jean jacket to remember him with,
to point up to him with, to point back at him with,
every time I put it on;
to match his garb in my memory with the garb
I now wear out into the rain of Oregon every day.
The jacket does the trick.
I imagine it could save my life, get me by
if I was stranded in a blizzard.
I wear it proudly.
I wear it like a cape.
I wear it like an inherited gift from Karson himself.
I wear it like 35 years of brother-deep friendship
that’s too near and dear and important
to ever really perish and pass from this world.
For Karson, I wear it
like that.