by Rebecca Lyon

The headlines said he fell because he thought he could fly. He didn’t. He fell because he was off his fucking face and I know because I was there. I was going to do it, but he got there first like he always did. He was lead guitarist, I was drums. But that was a long time ago. Before I got deaf and old and he stayed young.

Forked Tongue disbanded of course. And he used to fucking haunt me. Couldn’t see a guy with long hair without shivering. Couldn’t get free of that smell of fucking incense that used to hang around him. Couldn’t get clean.

I burned the albums we couldn’t sell. I thought he’d approve of the phosphorescent waste, the stinking glory. I imagined where the other copies might be. In the afterlife with him, or in charity shops.

Now I don’t hear his voice because I don’t wear my hearing aid. It fell into a container at the dump when I thought I saw his face smirk at me from behind a cracked plastic cover.

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Rebecca Lyon likes reading, writing and running, usually in that order. Her poem Ecclesia and the Hatran King, a dialogue between a statue destroyed by ISIS in Mosul and a statue destroyed by English iconoclasts in Winchester, was exhibited at Winchester Cathedral in 2015.