Ephew sometimes
thought of the time
he had met
a homely girl,
and asked
for her phone number.
She gladly
gave it to him.
When he decided
to call her,
the person who answered
had never heard of her.
Either she had moved or --
she just got rid of him.
After that he stuck
to the good-looking ones.
If you were going
to get short-shrifted,
it might as well
be done by a looker.
The old ersatz Tiffany lamp
that had belonged
to his grandmother
no longer seemed to have
the splendor it once had.
The colors were not so bright now,
and it gave off less light than before,
but even in a diminishing splendor
it still retained a certain dignity,
a particular bravado,
almost a hubris,
because it had suffered much,
yet had prevailed
over many, many decades
while lesser lamps
had gone to their doom
a long time before.
I said to my friend, Death.
Epicurus said:
'When we are, death is not;
and when death is, we are not.'
Death replied,
This philosophical stuff
beats the crap out of me.
After all, we're sitting here
talking, aren't we?
So we were -- and I wondered
if . . .
Raymond Mason began his writing career in the Fifties, writing pulp fiction novels, such as Forever is Today and Love After Five. For the last several years, he has devoted himself to poetry. This is his first appearance in Gnome.