Dear All My Good Friends

Dear all my good friends,

Dinner with my family today, and
I'm the first to get hit with a rain drop.
It sizzles and jumps as it hits my skin.
The world is burning–I assume you all know this by now–
I just didn't know our cycles were so in sync.
No one else felt them; it must have been a solitary tear.
Our salmon stays cooked and our candles still burn!

I have finally grown used to the alien firmness
of the guest room pillows.
These sheets are magnificent however;
not even The Count could count these threads.
The freshness of the stain on the wooden bed frame
adds color and chaos to my dreams. While awake,
I've started to take note of all the imperfections of this
square room. I think it wishes to be a circle.

I must confess that I have just been caught with my
proverbial pants around my theoretical ankles:
With my right cheek and my good eye in the sheets,
in, through a hole in the window screen,
flies a blood sucking incubus, fixing its needle towards my neck...
It's a shame they require a 100% effort to smash...
it's such a gruesome murder at much too early of an hour.

I haven't eaten (non-fish) meat in a little over a month now
and my burps have started to smell like half-ass bottle rockets.
The wind has been angry recently (which takes care of the burps),
but it's almost as if it has sensed the emptiness of the world
and decided to go on a run. I don't blame it.
The people of Earth are selfish,
why shouldn't the wind be?

My eyes haven't licked some of your faces in quite some time;
Im afraid to forget what some of you taste like.
To me, you are all seasonally released candy.
I would like at least one more taste before you go...
before the market changes and you leave the shelves
until the next time around.
I'm normally a one-snack-per-movie kind of guy,
but for you, all my good friends, I will make an exception.

Pages of time have passed where we have shared
ink stains and lines together, but in our own respective story books.
For some of you, your name and your longhand have been rather absent
in this new chapter of mine, which is... understandable and par for the course.
It does leave me with a certain "I need to brush my teeth, I can taste my tongue"
kind of feeling but, I'll just gargle mouthwash and be over it.

The next time you see me will be the next time you see me.
But in the meantime:
Pick a bulb off of the next sweet gum tree you see,
smell it, and just know that you are doing something
that I, Keegan Michael Shaw, loves to do.

Smell the right things and the world will smell you back.

With all the love there is to give,
The Name Mentioned a Few Lines Above

Keegan Shaw 3/30/20