I came to know about you only in the passing, a stray, days-old newspaper picked up on the F train. It simply said you jumped, you suicided. No picture or a life story (other than your last job: security guard) to go with description of the jump (a leap of eight floors, three or four seconds of air)

What this city grants us is anonymity and loneliness, even in dying, as it does in these subway window-reflected lives: a woman reading stories to her daughter, another woman reading a pocket bible, a busker with his guitar sleeping off his wailing through the rush hour press of swamp heat, a young couple, obviously in that green flush of love, whispering, unaware how soon there might be nothing left to say to each other.

So I bless you brother, and give you these words, these drowsy bodies in motion, this hour of quite Brooklyn summer you will not be able to feel under your consumed skin, with the hope someone else will be here, to say a kaddish for me when I jump.