Wayne and Terry

                    Wayne and Terry

Now both are gone, gone, so . . . so what?  One wrote

A lie and sent it to the other.  Then

A mother snooped and read.  She made the bloat

Of scandal and then other, loveless men

Stepped in with social cudgels.  Bragging weighed

As troubled fat on monsters in a myth

And so another man was ruined, made

To leave the college.  Rumor’s batholith

Was started by the slim one, slim and blond,

So slim he barely mattered, but his mind

And other organs mattered.  He was fond —

And so he lied.  This caused the tangled bind.

  Some sixty some odd years have covered two

    In graves.  Now that is something blackly true.

 ~ Phillip Whidden