He’ll Be Remembered

 

He’ll be remembered for the hair, I guess,

and all those crazy neckties, and his name

will be a synonym for something less

than promised, a punchline for drinking games,

the name they’ll invoke at spelling bees

when the winning word is braggadocio

and some skinny, owl-eyed kid asks, “Please

use it in a sentence?” and there they’ll go

again with that Dickensian name . . . and I’ll

always think of poker, his final sneer

of malevolent, stolen triumph while

slapping down the ace of spades, till he hears

the howls of laughter at the man who loses

everything to a lousy pair of deuces.

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Brattleboro, Vermont

February 2019

 

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