(The title of this poem is a quotation from 'The Tokyo-Montana Express', by Richard Brautigan)

In the very year my best friend and I

began to explore his work,

the writer killed himself,

depressed by the looming prospect of obscurity.

If we'd known this then,

what might we have done?

Now that I know, it feels right to commemorate his suicide

in a way of which the writer might have approved:

It's not an especially imposing memorial;

constructed as it is mainly of trout scales

and watermelon sugar, it stands on a plinth

fashioned from abandoned Christmas trees.

It reminds us that the writer felt he'd fallen out of favour,

but that it was only a temporary lapse;

because fashion is fickle and the words remain on the page,

untarnished by Time and the whim of the living.

Onto this monument

two snowflakes fall, unplanned.

They are shaped like Laurel and Hardy.

And this monument, too, shall fall.

But words need neither ink

nor a page,

not even a screen.

They have entered minds,

have been absorbed by the collective consciousness

and cannot, like the graves,