Dark Side Looking on the Bright Side

by The Old Guy Up Front

I don't think I'm on the dark side though my best friends do. They still love me but fear for me. I had a job once that I loved and believed I was born for. Then I was picked against my will to manage people in jobs like mine. I got the big picture and began to think outside the box and seek out positive rather than negative people and hire them and mentor them and lament the best friends I watched recede into the lines-upon-lines with scrims and scrims far away inside that gold-gilt frame, palimpsest like watery pox - poor pale Giotto, Poussin, and Perry alive! Yesterday, thinking about her sudden death at eighty-one, I stood up to face a starless December sky through my window, looked on the bright side from here and, like Neo the Third, felt my eyes, my sinuses, my really expensive shades, blow out in shards as if the bright had pressurized, volcanic, all that time.

6S

The Old Guy Up Front is retired, still writing, mostly poetry. An appalled Southern Liberal Democrat, he blogs occasionally here. For 6S, he's the author of Three Legs at Evening.