Playing the bottom card too soon

The Untold Story


It was an average morning
Sometime in February
Unremarkable sunrise
Certainly not the kind of thing that would call out amateur photographers
The poets were still hung over
So only the factory workers were missing it
A body floating above the horizon
Purple and slowly desiccating

Was it only a mirage
A reflection of a life just ending
A curiously well formed cloud
Whose alligator skin flaked into the contrail of a fast moving exhaust from the future
He couldn’t quite tell
Every time he raised the glasses
Thoughts got in the way
His oatmeal was burning

The phone rang
It was his mother
Nothing interesting
Then the sun broke through pierced his retina with a concentrated photon blast
Knocked him to the floor
So this was what it was like
He was between breaths
The next never came

He was the only eye witness
No one to tell it to
Unreported news
It took only 27 lines in a the C section of a newspaper he never read
God’s beta son gone
His underwear still in the washer
Ready to be put on
A modest world