by David O’Neal 

Eddo Curran and I
lived across the street from each other in grammar school
In Roslyn, Long Island, New York.
We were best friends.

Being red-blooded boys
grown out of our Tinker Toys,
we did risky stuff.

We rang doorbells at night
then hid behind trees while our victims shouted
“You boys are sleaze!”
We dropped sticks on passing cars
from branches hanging over Leafy Way;
we stole candy from Jackson’s drugstore;
we let air out of car tires;
we rang fire alarms.
We did unspeakable things.

Ed was a year younger —
so I was obliged to pick on him sometimes.
I threw ice-balls at him that were hard and dense
or made Ed’s sled crash into the fence.
I threw rocks into a fort of leaves
Ed was hiding behind
and he needed stitches in his left ear.
Once I threw a dart at him
      which briefly stuck
             in the back
                     of Ed’s
                            Head
                                  before
                                         fall-
                                               ing

                                                    out.

One day Ed butted me in the nose.
His head was hard, it hurt.
I never bullied him again.
Then I moved far away.

Ed Curran and I met again after fifty years.
We live in the same city,
sail on his boat,
and drink to each other’s health.
Sometimes I want to look
for scar tissue behind Eddo’s ear
and on the back of his head.
But I never will
because we’re best friends
That’s where it stays and ends.

David O’Neal is a retired rare book dealer now enjoying a second career as a writer, especially of poetry. His recent creative work has been published in The Eclectic Muse, Vision Magazine, Mississippi Crow, Two Hawks Quarterly, The New York Times, The Lyric, Open Minds Quarterly, Bird Keeper, The Magazine of the Parrot Society U.K., etc. and in anthologies such as The Marin Poets Anthology, Voices of Bi-Polar Disorder, Nurturing Paws, and Science Poetry. He has also written several books and compiled and edited Babbling Birds: An Anthology of Poems about Parrots from Antiquity to the Present.