The new disease came, but not without warning. The drugs were a toxic combo that kept the sick going another year. I loved how you talked in your sleep about free will. Your clothes smelled, but the blood levels were normal. Now I have seen the sun god: this is what I thought when I first saw you—the face, the bearing—but perfection of form meant nothing to you, and we were all just souls carrying around a corpse. I smoked hashish as the government slept. Drug companies held parties in Arizona & Florida.   The profit motive always lives. For those of us who didn’t sell well in the bars, it felt like revenge of the nerds. Goaded by your hand, I wrote poems, an essence squeezed out of this matter, what is memory now.