Ghosts And The Sick

A friend of mine 'believes in ghosts'
and rarely shares what that means,
perhaps he thinks I would not listen.

I suspect that what he ascribes to ghosts
are the hostile atmospheres, odd voices,
and uncanny presences, that go beyond
his explanations for everyday life.

And since his world is human-centric
what is uncanny has to be of human origin,
even when it is not about present day life.
He believes in 'trapped souls';
people who need the living
to settle the debts they left behind.

I get debt part - quite easily,
The Grateful Dead made it their brief
early in their careers to share the songs
written by so many long dead singers,
and in their sharing repay any debts they left.

Between the folk tradition, and the blues,
the 'race music' that grew thru Jim Crow laws,
paying your dues as a musician was one way
of paying off debt another musician left.

It all seems quite simple and logical.

The nearest I have come to seeing a ghost
was to see somebody very much alive
but with an with an incurable illness,
who was haunted to silence about it.
I knew him too little for him to speak. 
I knew he was 'gay and out',
he knew I was 'gay and in the closet',
a place where I haunted myself,
with who I wanted to be, and who I was not.

He had always been a big figure, well padded,
I fancy that a hug from him must have been bracing.
The last time I saw him all that was gone.
he face looked stricken, he was skin and bone,

No words were needed; his look said to me
'I have A.I.D.S. I don't have long to live'.

Incurable illness haunts the living, 
much more than debt unsettles the dead.
An incurable illness is the ghost
that haunts its host, it's carrier.