Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye

I said goodbye
to another bottle today,
the last of the Traverse City
chardonnay, three swigs,
the gritty remains

of decaying cork spit
into the sink. You left it here
and made me promise
not to drink it,

but it's been nearly a year now
without a word and I guess
you won't mind.

I would like to tell you
that I am starting over
yet again, the lonely nights
of loud music and too much gin,

the frenetic dancing, the tears,
the second-guessing and
tossing and turning,

but I know where once
you would have had
the right things to say,

now you'd have nothing
but cold words that
would only make these
unbearable nights hotter.

I've kissed too many women
goodbye on the rims of
bottles, and now that the wine
is gone, I can work on the whiskey,

a taste that will linger far longer
than the stains on sheets
and the rubber on pavement
stretching too many miles from here.

Another Death Rattle for the Monarchy

*A note from the author*

I was cleaning out my hard drive and found this odd little bit of prose that I have only vague memories of writing. It seemed worthy of the blog site, so here it is:




The other day, long before much of anything interesting had occurred on the lawn, Darryl walked solemnly down the stairs of his palatial six-bedroom bungalow, took the large, college-bound dictionary from his son’s bookshelf and heaved it across the room so hard that it left the imprint of part of the word “American” and part of the word “Heritage” on the photograph of Prince Phillip that his son for some reason deemed important enough to frame.

“Show-off,” muttered Darryl.

And then later, some hours after the firemen were able to extinguish the flames at poolside, just as things were returning to their normal, suburban state, not much else happened beyond his son, Chuck, wandering back home in a daze of sun poisoning and a ravenous boner, accidentally kicked his big toe into the hardbound dictionary that lay out of place on the floor of his bedroom, which caused him to look down and see out of the corner of his eye the black and white photo of Liz’s man with a motherfucking trademark curling above his upper lip.

Another death rattle for the monarchy.