Read Your Obituary

I thought you dead long since,
as you most likely thought me,
lost to words and ill-humor,
winters in the North,
endless bowel movements.
Amour? What else?
Sitting on oak chairs composing
serious nonsense, philosophies
expounded into airiness,
obscure despairs, dum de dum dum . . . dum.
Here’s something else not in the paper:
your reaching for your wife’s neck
with the deceitful tenderness of hate
rising in your brain like an epic.
You tempered your mean enduring passion
with all those wan adulteries.
Women cooing in the so-called
glamorous aura of your genius.
Time makes us more weary than healed.
We become hyphenated dates on stone,
the Latin epitaph in weeds.
Fame fleeting into the gentle nowhere.
Just a breath of words from your rival
you can’t hear, envying you
your new freedom where nothing
meets nothing.

JW Major