I’m in shock.
I can’t believe.
Now you’re gone.
And we all grieve.
It hurts me more
Than I’d have thought
To think about
The pain this brought.
I had known you from the time I was four,
When you and your brother knocked on our door.
My sister and he were the best of friends,
And that was the start of so many week-ends.
We had the whole town to play hide-n-seek,
Capture the flag was another such treat.
We tried to make whirlpools out of your pool,
No one could tell us we looked like a fool.
Some time in there my family moved,
Friendships do last, as the group of us proved.
Colorado was now my new place to call home,
Far from Connecticut, it was a new place to roam.
Another move took us to Virginia,
It had been a few years since I had seen ya.
You and your mom drove down one spring,
I got to see you and your dozen earrings.
You stepped out of your mother’s sedan,
No longer a boy, but still not a man.
Your blonde hair was long and parts were in dreads,
You looked so much like all those other Dead Heads.
Taller than me now by a foot and a half,
The picture in my mind like a still photograph.
That was the last time that I saw you alive,
What in the hell makes people drink and drive?
The moron you rode with thought he was fine,
He couldn’t even stay on his side of the line.
He totalled his car on the side of a bridge,
You were thrown out, over the ridge,
And fell forty feet to the pavement below.
If there was pain, you didn’t know.
The moron ran off, didn’t seem to care,
Now he’s in jail, he’d better stay there.

Written in loving memory of Ben Bero. Rest in Peace.