Long Distance Call (A True Story) Poem by Allan Thorne

She calls me from LA.
She has had a heart attack,
By pass surgery,
And two rotten teeth extracted
In the last year.

Her daughter just had cancer surgery
And the daughter’s husband,
A Russian with no papers,
Has been diagnosed with AIDS.
(No! I am not making this up.)

Her son is trying to make it as a male model.
He has earned fifty thousand dollars
That he cannot seem to collect
And in the mean time
Has run up thirty thousand dollars
In credit card bills.

Despite all this
And the fact that she has mortgages
On three properties around LA
But no income.
She sounds pretty chipper.
Must be some good drugs they are giving her.

She talks for an hour about:
How her daughter will find a job.
How her son in law will make some money
Rebuilding motorcycles.
How her son will make a lot of money In Italy.

She talks of:
The legal maneuvers she plans
To keep the creditors at bay.
The checks that are in the mail.
The paper work that will be signed.

At the end of it all I realize
That the entire hour she has been
Talking about a dream
A dream she lives in full time now
As a storm of disaster thickens around her.

The other day I was chopping up an evergreen bough
That was still green even though
It has been off the tree
For two months.
It just didn’t know it was dead yet.

That’s my friend
The money has stopped
But she is still green and full of hope
She doesn’t realize she is
Already dead.