It was forty years ago, next Tuesday that your life was taken away;
A long, lingering passing, drowning in a sea of your own fluids;
Death by four capital letters;
I don’t want to remember how it was at the end. The sweat, the vomit,
And what I’ll call the bowl movements (so as not to make genteel readers blush);
I prefer to remember the triumphs. How you recused me. You loved unselfishly
Releasing me from guilt and terror and my previous unbearable, unrealised life;
My confusion cleared; I gave my soul to you. I stood on your shoulders;
A fumbling start, bulging cut-offs, gym-honed bodies. Unrestrained dancing in the dark;
Yes, and whisky and coke taking us to oblivion. Then came, true love;
Were I Shakespeare I’d write a sonnet in your honour, about deep feelings between two people (skirting over his warnings on the dangers of lust!);
But I’m no poet. So, all I do is scribble unworthy words about how you taught me to live;
And all the time I carry the burden of wretched failure. For, I proved unworthy of you;
It was forty years ago that you left me and since that day I never dared love again.
So, what do I have? A life that I do not live, enveloped in my self-imposed solitude;
Not even a cat nor a dog to call my own, I won’t commit to any breathing thing,
Confined to my job, the weekly shop and Vera on the telly.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 