Overheard, Lee Mandel [short novels in english .TXT] 📗

Overheard


Often times life’s path can be strange
Incorporating various obstacles and range.
And just when you think you’ve mastered the art,
Something occurs that alters the heart.
Take for example a simple lunch
To discuss with a friend my on-going hunch.

While I sat alone at the table to wait
For my friend to meet me for our lunch date,
I overheard a woman from a table near
Of a story that most would generally fear.
Her voice too familiar, I knew it quite well.
As she spoke, my eyes started to swell.
Her words conveyed an event that just passed.
My life as I knew it took off with a flash.

Her story changed my life’s perception
And aim my world in a new direction.
When I tried to imagine the horrible scene,
My stomach churned and my face turned green.
Her recount of an accident and life’s great loss
Of a man she described as her “wonderful boss.”

I was afraid to turn my head to confirm
And secure the facts that I had just learned.
But I did turn my head to view the narrator.
For a single moment I admit I did hate her.
She’d been his secretary a number of years.
But today she had exposed all of my fears.
They were having an affair for a time you see.
I was going to offer him a choice: her or me.


His service said he was “out to lunch.”
I decided to add that lie to the bunch.
But as she sat at the very next table,
I listened to horror to the upsetting fable,
Of the man she has lost to an untimely end,
As he sat crushed in his Mercedes Benz.

He was leaving her; back to a wife he described,
As the “love of his life, that he’d compromised.”
And how he was returning to make amends,
While leaving behind his extra-marital friend.
But his luck would turn with unhappy plight,
As the truck that hit him gave his car flight.
He ended up dead and unable to tell
The wife he loved, without her he was an empty shell.

My heart was cut not once, but twice
As the words became real and concise.
My friend came in and saw shock on my face.
She thought it was due to her being late.
She read my eyes with an urgent message to tell,
But my hope was shattered; my heart just fell.
She ushered me out into the air
And wiped my tears with genuine care.
It was of no use, my loss cemented.
My life was now completely reinvented.

So now I sit in funerary solitude
Weighing the changes and their magnitude.
Lost forever of him and the connection
Forever changed by fate’s cruel dissection.

Publication Date: 11-02-2011

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