PrintPoem – Misanthrope at Sunset Manor (By Donal Mahoney)
Even as a child
Charles couldn’t forgive other children
not for something they had done
but rather for who they were.
They were inferior and couldn’t help it,
his parents both agreed.
Charles couldn’t stand any of them.
This continued his entire life.
Charles almost married a woman
he had hired only to discover later
she wasn’t perfect, no better than
the little people he had hired to
wrap and mail thousands of shirts
manufactured in Bangladesh.
He sold the company at 80
and retired a multimillionaire.
Charles never liked himself either
but he had fewer flaws, he thought,
than anyone he had ever met.
Now in old age he trolls the halls
of Sunset Manor in an electric wheelchair
other residents on canes and walkers
call his tank, making sharp turns while
looking for someone he might like.
Author Bio:
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has had fiction and poetry published in various publications in the U.S. and elsewhere. Among them are The Galway Review (Ireland), The Recusant (England), The Missing Slate (Pakistan), Guwahatian Magazine (india), Bluepepper (Australia), The Osprey Journal (Wales), Public Republic (Bulgaria), and The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey). Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12.blogspot.com and some of his newer work at https://www.antarcticajournal.com/donal-mahoney-recent-works