Dead at a Bus Stop

Ben Stanton’s life went out in the night,

Neath the white feet of winter tread,

Unseen by all for want of feeling,

That night caught, in a wind screaming as revenants do; it ripped past

the still buildings and, wove down the stream of lights beside him,

Cars, the light bearers; metal phantoms, ticking time enough for snow

to pile,

And all the while,

No hoof champed the ground there to signal aid in winter’s wail,

Ben wouldn’t have shelter,

For he was privy to its false sentiment, like ivy crumbling its

foundations,

Inside no respite, meant only to bide time out of our old gray Eden,

Ghost, wraith, spectre of what may’ve been if not for misfortune,

He owned little beyond the clothes on his back,

Besides those things, a thin blanket, a D cell torch and, a bottle of

whiskey,

The cold blanket snapped like a twig when removed from round his

body,

The D cell was dead, the whiskey empty,

As dead and, as empty as he,

Ben’s mother was not surprised when she’d heard the gloom had

passed,

For it was, among other things; mercurial and, lovesome for pain,

The kind unkind found in the sting at the end of every upturned bottle,

She said, in a voice as cold as the night already forgotten, “I wish he

would have sought shelter, 

She sighed one last time for the son,

“At least now it is over.”