Since it was lunchtime
we drank beer in the bar,
later we drank whiskey.
Carl, the sensitive one,
spoke about starving children;
he used to be a pre school teacher
but kept showing up for work drunk.
Children loved him though,
cried when he left.Eric
and I ignored him
and spoke about things we had read in the paper.
Eric was the intellectual one
he could have been something great,
so his mother said,
if it hadn’t been for us;
couldn’t find work challenging enough
lived with an elderly widow in the vicinity.
Me? I was a chef fired for drinking red wine meant for the sauce,
still worked part time as a short order cook
and lived in the basement of my mother’s house.

The evening went smoothly when disaster struck
Eric fell off his barstool,
dead in every sense of that word.
The barman was so shocked
that he gave Carl and me a bottle of scotch
and told us to go.
We sat by the docks finishing the bottle
mourning Eric’s untimely demise,
then I walked home
Carl cried and wanted to be alone.
They fished him out of the sea next day.
Two funerals in a week and racked by guilt
I shouldn’t let left him on his own,
he was the sensitive one,
ought to have known that he was suicidal.
It was an unkindly nice day
when I left my town to join the merchant navy,
have sat in many dockside bars since,
the all look the same and I’m always alone.