NOT FADE AWAY?

As I approach my eighth decade, the number of friends and relatives now deceased is high. Each individual is remembered, of course: that's their immortality. 

When my generation and the next are gone, however, those memories will die with us.

REMEMBER ME

A much-loved childhood friend, who died too young,

smiles from a faded photograph today:

along with other snaps, his sits among

dead parents, aunts and uncles, an array

of family pets in amber, monochrome,

all trapped forever, or till I’m deceased,

like insects, in this stout, unwieldy tome.

Should I feel shame that somehow I have ceased

to think of him, to mourn his tragedy,

his early exit, unrehearsed and swift,

he who, back then, meant everything to me?

Has fickle memory cast him adrift

as one does a glass bottle in the sea,

its message, scrawled in hope, remember me?

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/ 

ALL CHANGE

This one's autobiographical but it all happened so long ago that I suspect that the other participants may well be pushing up the daisies by now. 

TEENAGERS

That rotten night, the party in full swing,

a teenage girl, with whom I was in love

or thought I was, who’d kept me on a string,

discarded me as though I were a glove 

and danced with my best friend. I felt a fool,

humiliated to be cast aside

so publicly, for she was cold and cruel

as only teenagers can be. My pride

took such a hammering, I almost wept,

but love’s skin-deep so, when the music played

a new girl asked me for a dance, I leapt,

and, having danced for half an hour, she stayed

then, three weeks later, I moved on from her:

it’s no holds barred when you’re a teenager.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/ 

NO FLY ZONE

A story poem this week. 

MOZART          

The photograph is monochrome

and taken years ago at home:

where home was then, although not now.

It doesn’t matter anyhow.

What matters is the image there:

a teenage girl with long dark hair,

unsmiling with, upon her arm,

a parakeet, her lucky charm,

named Mozart. How she loved that bird.

We joked, at times, that she preferred

her Mozart to the rest of us.

No matter: it was ever thus.

His wings were clipped: a bird earthbound,

he always seemed to be around

He lives now with our brother, Tim,

who tolerates but dislikes him

for he associates Mozart

with that thing which sets us apart.

Her early death brought misery

to Tim and me, her parents … she

stepped off a ledge, ten stories high,

but, like poor Mozart, could not fly.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/