The bard worked hard at putting me through my paces.
I’ll always recall all that alcohol with a shiver.
He was one of the boys whose roistering shows in their faces,
And I felt it, too. I was Dylan Thomas’s liver.
Word-drunk and out of control – that’s a short-run role.
Few can sustain a performance so chaotic.
He was just 39 when the role took its final toll,
And he left me merely fatty, not yet cirrhotic.
Suppose he had survived those nights in New York,
Anvilled his demons to hammer out some sort of reckoning?
Suppose he had managed a few more decades of work,
Had hurtled less hard at the dark he could always feel beckoning?
Sometimes I get together with Dylan’s brain
And we tease each other with what ifs that never were.
We neither one would go back and live it again –
Such brilliant high points, so much that’s mostly a blur.