WHEN DEATH COMES, IT WILL HAVE YOUR EYES (Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi )

WHEN DEATH COMES, IT WILL HAVE YOUR EYES (Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi ) I once knew a man who knew a man who had seen F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking a milkshake in a drug store (vanilla or chocolate he couldn't be sure) flicking idly through a magazine ( no he didn't know which magazine ) in the company of some blonde. "I'll never forget what he said!" "Let's go to the supermarket Shelia!" he said. And that's it? "That's it!" His voice caressed each syllable as if he were on stage. But he was like a man becoming a manakin like in that episode of The Twilight Zone you know the one?" In a future that had as yet to happen. "I don't know what I had expected..." The man who knew the man who knew the man who had seen and heard F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Maybe a Gatsby or a Gatsby who had survived the novel's tragic ending and wished he hadn't!" *** Here now at home Mr. Fitzgerald sits in his armchair eating a chocolate bar checking out next year's Princeton football team. suddenly like a puppet yanked on a string he stands up hand on mantlepiece like some bad acting in a silent movie before falling to the floor. He will never get up. *** Nick and Gatsby come stand by his dying. So do Monroe Stahr and Kathleen Moore even though words fail them. Yet they now more real than he. Monroe reads some last scribbled lines. "There was a flutter from the wings of God and you lay dead. Your books were in your desk I guess and some unfinished chaos in your head was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies." Gatsby closes his eyes.

Request permission to use this poem

Written by

For You?