Welcome to the LitKicks 24 Hour Poetry Party. We asked poet provacateur Bob Holman for a contribution, and he sent this moving remembrance of lost friends. Bob Holman was the poet responsible for bringing poetry slams to New York City (after they'd been invented in Chicago) and is known as a hardworking and dedicated advocate for the diverse spirit of modern alternative literature.

Night of the Living Dead Every Day

by Bob Holman

Help Me I Can See --sign on Pedro's begging can

Pedro Juan Pietri Aponte and Spalding Gray
and me
are in a room marked No Exit. They are just dead
together in me (age 56 today, living). Sartre says Pedro
Bunuel continues Spalding, The Exterminating Angel
Braque and Picasso I
am quick
to add. The triangulation
my dear dead friends and I
the third who walks beside, the third man,
earth man.
One dies in water, one dies in air
I walk the earth fair who cares
it is spring again, I wonder
why, as James Schuyler once said
wrote to no one
in particular and always
Pedro's ironic birthday
3/21/44 first day of spring of, a poet
who became a poet
when he failed miserably
as an undertaker
died March 2
or 3 round midnight
twixt time zones
to die on two days
Mexico to US
twixt two cultures
on his way to 60.

What can I say
write? Swimming
with Spalding upstream to Green
Point, the icy flow and corduroy
ferrying home. You can't
sleep with the fishes cause
the fishes don't sleep as Nick
Jones says
sings. He's a good swimmer
even with his dragging foot
and head plate, pulls me along
to shore where we rest for a while.

The doors and windows of Romero
open in one direction but they open
and the zombies are everywhere. Pedro

is hooting and Spalding is dancing and
I am writing it down down like time sinks.
Good line says Pedro who can rhyme
sublime with sublime and love with
what the fuck. Spalding is pattering
and patering, this is their first meeting
and now we are here forever someone mentions (ok, me)
trying to make the lines that add
up not
down.

Only I am breathing. Awfully
parochial says my man Spalding
Pedro is sleeping Speedo
I can't sleep says Spalding remembering everything

In Speedo's dream is life all over
but never again
never all over again
we'd worship all afternoon
at the altar in the Men's Shelter
dice and rice and cheap red wine
and Spalding says the word Happiness
we are all touched as zombies
scale the walls to the 38th floor
busting in as the room breathes
axes in the windows they are singing
Happy Birthday to me, surprise, and
the words are Auld Lang Syne