Future First Mutual Life Insurance

Mr Williams putt-putted a small boat
out through the heads

slipped over the side
pulled the dark

dark sea around him
and emerged on land as Mr Jones

the pale, kept-to-himself
new neighbour of Mrs Williams, widow

with her brand-new car and, finally
sending the kids to a "good school".

word around the clothes lines
and fruit-vined fences was

something's going on
but who are we to poke our noses?

a million, they say,
the insurance claim, and paid

though they never found a body
so Future First Mutual kept the change.

those moonlit nights she would steal
out through the hedge and slip down his blinds

her husband, this man
never so alive than since he was dead

each kiss each kiss the invention of breath
and breathless each kiss would revive them.

but change or no change, there would be deeming
and claiming in the craws of the neighbours

that the widow Williams must have been faking
and fraud! fraud! a million times fraud! they all cried

have you no shame, Williams and Jones
no sense of the value of human life?

it’s people like you make our premiums high
and Mr Williams, exhumed, spent six years inside

and Mrs Williams resumed counting the nights
like coins into piles for the bills.

Future First Mutual tut-tutted through their people
their balance restored like a hole in the water

and later bought-in to Wexton and Co.
engineers of those precision drones

that can wipe out a whole wedding
for just six million a go

This poem appears in

Pass it Along