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Thanks for being a bad young man with a good heart,
you sad black Hamlet holding up an eight-ball like a skull.
You taught the hero suffering. Not with super powers,
masked villain firing off lightning bolts, fiery bombs
or blasts from eyes, you conjured instead
the inner sorrow while he witnessed your plight,
wanted to help, could not . . . that wholesome
American white boy spinning his web of self-deceptions.
There you were with stink of the inner city
covering you like worn girls, frayed, who loved you
for long brown hands, tenderly holding their sexy white
cocaine. Yes, thanks for being less than a monster,
being human, all too human, less a comic-book Superman,
but Nietzsche's. Thanks, too, for being named Ace,
a debt I owe you although, when we met
like combatants in pages of your history,
I had never smoked weed or tobacco,
never even heard of chardonnay.
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