Every now and then I capture an image of you, Dillon. As ever, you are hazed, wide-apertured, posed, albeit in a second-hand context:
The young barista’s coffee-stained fingers, graceful, as an artist’s instrument, the hands of an unrealized classical pianist.
The slouching young man at the convenience store counter -- shifting foot-to-foot against the tedium of purchasing cigarettes.
Everything quietly screaming The urgency of being done. As if the quotidian were insufferable.
That was like you, Dillon – the forced grace, the impatience and hypersensitivity, The susceptibility to sensory overload.
No wonder, then, your need for respite, For an artificially filtered calm, for an absence of noise, and excessive saturation for the blissful neutrality of nothingness.
That is how, in the dark rooms of my heart, I process your absence These twelve years on -- How I attempt to soft focus one of our last several encounters: That time when you said, flat voiced, all seriousness, “I never asked to be here.”
Jack Andrew Urquhart was born in the American South. Following undergraduate work at the University of Florida, Gainesville, he taught in Florida's public schools. He earned a Master of Arts degree in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was the winner of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Award for Fiction (1991). His work has appeared online at Clapboard House Literary Journal, Crazyhorse Literary Journal, and Standards: The International Journal of Multicultural Studies. He is the author of So They Say, a collection of self-contained, inter-connected stories and the short story, They Say You Can Stop Yourself Breathing. Formerly a writing instructor at the University of Colorado’s Writing Program, Mr. Urquhart was, until 2010, a senior analyst for the Judicial Branch of California. He resides in Washington State.
Every Man Jack ... 
I love your poetry, Jack, but it’s so very sad.