Death and Licorice

Anger and great disappointment meet like sweet vermouth and Kentucky straight bourbon, a sobering drink. No evil waits for us in the dark savoring our failures, no saints celebrating our victories, and the man in Rome is an ordinary house fly, nothing remarkable. Death and laurels, death and black ribbons. We sit together, but quite alone, on a bench chewing licorice in our shade gardens, each of us longing for a community to embrace us before we pass into the unknown, quite alone. Quite quite.