Free A Horse Named Sorrow by Trebor Healey Page A

pronounced it was. He’d stop on the sidewalk and I wouldn’t notice until I was ten feet past him, so lost I’d been in my musings about Ivan or Tanya or my mother’s preference for Jim Croce over Joni Mitchell.
    Pull.
    He’d catch up then and grab ahold of my hand, maybe bite my ear. And sometimes he’d run me like a dog down the block. Because I really was like a dog to Jimmy. A good companion. And he knew how to calm my barking.
    Sometimes he just grabbed me. The steadying embrace of James Damon Keane. Pulling me. Squeezing me. Making a bowl for my soup.
    Jimmy loved to dance, while I’d go on and on about how I didn’t like to dance and didn’t know why, and maybe it was the places, or the people, or the music, or maybe there was just something wrong with me. He’d just look at me and say: “Seamus … pull.” Then he’d give me a big hug, and I’d go and just find a nice place to sit more often than not, with my sketchpad, or put back beers and smoke cigarettes or pot and watch Jimmy like some mom at a soccer game. How he danced all alone in his own little trance, his head rolled back past his shoulders, the Chinese sideburn tattoo on his pale skin like a beacon to spot him by. He danced sort of like Pig Pen, and dressed like him too, all grungy.
    And I sat and watched him a lot, whether it was dancing or when he was reading his poems.
    Because Jimmy had quickly become a little sensation in the SF poetry scene—and not just because he was cute and edgy, with that tattooed face, but because he was different in that he wrote no poems about Jimmy or gimmicky hipster drama. He was never arch. He wrote poems about nothing places and the nobody people whom he described in vivid colors—little knots in his long, long string:
    Men who look like frogs
    And gather bullet casings from highway ditches
    With their tongues
    Men like flies who smell the shit of consumption
    And gather
    Men like big wandering hairy children
    Who’ve turned in their stingray bikes for F-150s
    They know the earth in the way that children do
    By its trash and its puddles
    Men
    Like frogs
    Tadpoles of a promising four-legged, croaking death
    Hot damn Jimmy and the silences he wrought. The timbre of his voice.

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    Jimmy had gotten a job through Sam and Julie, those same friends who snatched him away from me after the bath. Good thing too because he’d get insurance eventually, but not for six months, at which point we’d also learn it didn’t cover pre-existing conditions. So much for that.
    Well, he got paid at least. He worked at the blood bank, as a warehouse man. Funny Jimmy. Dark Jimmy. A vampire at the blood bank. He was the warehouse man, shipped the blood all around.
    â€œYou ever drop it, Jimmy?”
    â€œYeah, and it bounces.” His little grin.
    â€œNever breaks?”
    â€œNah, the bags are thick and rubbery.”
    â€œDo you get to drink for free like I do at the coffee shop?”
    â€œNo, but I smear it all over my face when I’m angry—what do you think?” Jimmy would get tired of my caffeine-blitzed chatter after work, especially if he wasn’t feeling well. And I talked on and on while I opened mail, folded clothes, listened to phone messages, throwing out my doubts and anxieties and talking my endless nonsense. Sometimes he’d grab me—and squeeze, and squeeze, until it was like all the caffeine went right out of me, and then we were kissing, and our clothes were being pulled by the other, and we were naked, our eager cocks poking at each other, the dark hair around his cock as black as his chin’s, and me muttering, “Jimmy, Jimmy, oh fuck, Jimmy.”
    â€œShame,” and he’d look me in the eye. And then he held his finger to his mouth, “shhhh.”
    It’s like he fucked the madness right out of me.
    â€œI fuckin’ love you, Jimmy.”
    â€œOh yeah?” Deadpan Jimmy.
    And