What the Goonies couldn't say.

Friends chip in for the final lift.
A massive heart attack, premature.
Or plain loneliness.
A casket not big enough
for the heart he hid all along.

----------

A loan shark's three best henchmen
with baseball bats in a dark alley...
no, in his own driveway.
Or lung cancer.
Either way, hundreds at the funeral
some to say goodbye
some to make sure he's gone for good.


----------

The family laughs about it as usual
toasting his death as they did his life.
Cirrhosis finally set in, you see.
Cheap whiskey and a cheaper toupee
thrown in the coffin at the last minute as one last
shot to the ribs, how he would've wanted it.

----------

Locked in his fortress of a house
trophy wife calling the accountant
before the undertaker.
A simple box of pine nothing like
the one he'd picked with the velvet lining
and combination lock to protect
the valuables he'd planned on taking with him.

----------

Quietly and comfortably in his own home
with great-grandchildren by his side
at an age old enough
to have seen the world he was paid to write about
though his tone became more biased with experience.
Finally not afraid of that world
and almost not afraid of himself.
The "winner," if there can be one in this Event.

----------

And as for me?
Legends don't die, motherfucker.
We just dwindle day-by-day
until the Rapture.