LiVE MAG!

Disappointment Book

The disappointment book is never full,
Ever milkier lamentations

Curdle.
Yet why invoke dead friends

For listless complaints
Of loveless years,

Of infuriating injustice?
They’re not here and cannot hear.

Elegy for An Engineer

The mind with a brain tumor discovers new talents.
Unappreciated, they die with this patient dying
Impatient and pissed.  See you in heaven, I scribble, then
Fold  the page and place that letter in the drawer
Of his coffin.  Yellow leaves do hang
Over the open grave.  The piper wails.  His widow
Asks his daughter, Who the Hell’s the guy
With the bagpipe?  After the whirling reception
At Queen’s, once the friends leave,
And the flowers start to fade, and the widow
And the son are lonely again, and --
What can you say about the kindly engineer
Who loved children because they were so gullible
And whose charming absurd stories I’ll never
Sort from the truth because Dad told me
And I loved him?  Goodbye.  I tried
To love you as well as you loved me.
 
Kenneth Bailey Andre
29 August 1915
14 November 2001