A large impressive greeting card
Hand drawn by a master painter
With magical colored pencils or
Perhaps scratched out angularly by
A novice with a graphite pencil
Pejoratively depicting a rose
A naked woman, a motorcycle
Or all three with some skulls
Various compositions of images
Depicted in states of operation
These visceral symbols of actual
Freedom and desperate longing
Reminders of wasted virility
And times ambiguous cruelty
The inside of the card and back
Covered in scrawled epithets
Eulogies reading like elegies
As bros wishing well
As though an implacable illness
Manifest on ones day of birth
Make your mark boys, let em' know
Measuring love in signatures
Elite trauma unit — united infamy
The John Hancock of murderers
Misanthropes, and junkies
All heathens and hardened
Scratched and scribbled — some
Barely legible and so very valued
With them with us and we
Know that you were here, now
In a memory of a day that
A tradition was born
Living vicariously, but still living,
Sort of | JM