I didn’t expect a weathered man
my age wearing a Stetson hat,
one thumb hooked in the pocket
of filthy jeans, to come drifting
from behind the rusted yellow
dumpster in the back-alley of the
Blue Moon Gentlemen’s Club.
My grandfather, who drank himself
to death twenty-five years before my
birth, escorting me to the next plane
when the bullet torpedoes quick
through my whiskey soaked brain.
Who makes these assignments,
some cherubic bureaucratic being?
Probably not God. He’d have bigger
things to see to, what with tsunami’s
and hurricanes washing people away.
Unattended toddlers tipping into
irrigation canals. But it could be He
purposely picks who the escort will be
just for a laugh at the look on the new
ghost’s face when a stranger floats
into view. Why wouldn’t God have a sense
of humor too? He must get bored, telling
the same old jokes to the angelic host.
“A pirate stumps into a bar . . .”
As it was, I couldn’t stand by and watch Mom
waste away, age two decades overnight and die
after the last round of chemo was several
months behind. Instead, I stood on the other side
of her bedroom door while she sank,
awash in a private sea of pain meds.
Maybe she didn’t show at the Blue Moon
out of resentment for all those days I hid
doggy-paddling through bottles, drifting
off on a stone pipe’s smoke. Leaving her
before she could leave me.
Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. Look for his poetry in Rogue Agent, Tattoo Highway, Ink&Nebula, Plainsongs Magazine, and elsewhere.
