by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried
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Dear Beatles fans, You may picture me as a saucer-eyed flower child with golden hair and thigh-high skirts. I’m eighty now, a lot more covered, a lot more knowing— yet I still don’t understand why George soured on me. In “Something,” the song he wrote for me, he said I don’t need no other lover, but that was a lie. You should know— like picking bon bons from a gift box, he slept with any girl he fancied. Until he slept with Ringo’s wife in our mansion— yes, I caught them in a bedroom. Eric, my second husband, pursued me for years, wrote “Layla” for me. But he, too, couldn’t keep his sex in his pants. And he drank. When he had a child with his Italian lover, while I was trying to have a child with him, I had to go. Demolished. My womb refused to flower for either spouse. Reading their letters now, thinking how they trashed my love, is it any wonder I’m selling these reminders? Old age is expensive. The doctor visits, the tests, the treatments— Once I was a sylph with the palest skin and hair, too naive to demand more alimony from two multi-millionaires who slayed the world with their guitars.
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Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Consequence, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Sparks of Calliope.
Wonderful poem she has channeled Party Boyd.
This is a great poem that has a lot of meaning to me. Although I never met a Beatle.