Death of a Football Star

Still arms will not hang straight; they remember in cramps tonight how with these limbs I lifted him, huge, myself child to his man, onto the cart, white sheets and wheels, my ears jammed with ringing and silence, the shouts of attendants unheard, but then, ganged into a corner, held hard from hurting the dead, my ears returned with one sound: the tick of bearings and clock as they wheeled his huge stillness away. Afterwards I was so clumsy, all things were so slow afterwards. In my hand the coffee cup rose, weightless and drifting and white. I drank once without any taste and set the cup down for a year, smashed it without any force, and bled for forever until a doctor prescribed pills to calm me, who was calm as the form of my friend.

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