Category: Lies

Everybody was very young
careers and address yet to be urgent
status for a boy : notches on the bedpost
for girls
the resistance to becoming one.

He was a kind of godfather to us
considerably older
but not old
a person who suspended judgement
or disguised it well.
Gentle and appealingly bedraggled
he seemed mystified at the worldliness of the world.
A sweet daughter and mad hatter wife
completed a triangle of eccentricity.

We were delighted when he entered business
it was for the customers he said
money wasn’t important. We willed success.
A member of our self appointed importance
became his first employee.
We were envious of the favour that fell
workload was higher than imagined.
Still, the cause was good – God’s work.

Later, some muted disquiet between the two
the owner worried out loud
his former employee had navigated turbulent waters
young people do…. vegetables to the desert of youth
just a sweet kid – needing some time out.

As is frequent in the yacht race of life
participants clustered at the start
scatter on the ocean of opportunity.
Back in port many years later
stories abounded of shipwrecked employees.

The reply was chilled and authoritarian
sharp correction of erroneous belief
a reprimand
part rebuke – part retort
the tone used to impart what should not be forgotten.

She said she wasn’t a smoker.
As someone who never had
I could smell the lie
a lie that wasn’t
but makeup applied to a disfiguring blemish.

By Ecclesiastes there is a time for everything
and nicotine’s reign of cool had passed.
Denial of vice wasn’t the point
emphasis of strength was.

She was my successor
I had confessed regret
regret at meager return on investment in change.
Workplace esteem
so often a fugitive from truth, confided failure
equating efforts at change to squeezing water.
It came to willpower she said. Said she had it in abundance.

Willpower coughs at tobacco weakness
the whiff of imperfection.
Brief absences returned with nicotine’s exhaust
require listened away from inconsistency
an author reviewing their own work
the ascendancy of purity over disclosure
a matter of selection.
The difference between an obituary and a eulogy.

We never knew his surname
he was just Con.
He’d retired here by the sea
built his own home.
We found him when he opened it to us
a sporting event in a town with not enough beds
civic pride asked residents to assist
he answered the plea – he was like that.

“There are no strangers, only friends we haven’t met”
so the cliché says
on coasters
on fridge magnets
on posters – to eyes that know better
but in the surf echoing lounge of our meeting
it just was.
There was warmth.
and shyness
a shyness that never went away
the shy of people finding magic
knowing to disturb or classify is to vaporize.
After the first time
we stayed with him every year.

Oceanfront bar
doors bifold to the horizon.
Sunday, warm and blue
the blue of Monet or Van Gogh
sky and sea of arms flung exultance
a day beyond mutation
bliss, memory could never edit
perfection unalterable by circumstance.

Glasses raised in the beer sparkling sunshine
a coastal freighter freeze frames into harbour
bar patrons denounce and cheer satellite sport.

Amid updating the year past
and plan swapping of the one to be
we asked about his shoulder.
He said it had responded to massage and therapy
had talked to the surgeon
and decided to wait – “ give it a bit more time.”
He died three months later – bone cancer.