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This writing was accepted for publication in the 96 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “am I really extinct” Down in the Dirt (v122) (the Mar./Apr. 2014 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book the Beaten Path (a Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2014 collection book)		get the 372 page Jan. - June 2014 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Passover

Daniel J O’Brien

He dreamed a morphine dream.
It was a hospice dream,
bathed by memories of darker
times made bright by a twist of plot,
believing scars he inflicted quickly healed.

In all his dreams he craved water,
feeling his sandpaper throat closing.
The drink never came - just Kodachrome
images of the old house with the leaky roof
and the well-trimmed hedges.
Once he passed out in them stepping
out of his car. One drink too many,
a chapter often repeated with regret.

She was there. She was always there,
even when he drank, and hit, then
left her all alone to cry. It was a catholic
marriage for which she had no escape.
Fifty years passed, and those times were
forgotten by the closing of iron curtains.

Now she was with him again in summer 1964,
riding the tire-framed Ferris wheel, watching Manhattan
standing tall in the distance. It had been
a good time and she was alive,
reaching out her hand to pull him toward her,
yearning to take him to the place where guilt falls
away and sweet music plays.

The dream begins to dissolve.
The morphine expires, and images of loftiness
become hardened in the cold mist
of reality.

Soon he realizes he is still alive,
and the place where she lives is a place
he knows he can never go.
He knows they are standing over him,
waiting, crying, remembering.
He remembers, too.
The dropper touches his lips. Soon he
will remember as they have, of happy
times, days of penance, reinvention,
and the opiate trance he hopes
will be his last dream before nothingness
- or fire.

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