For the weekly We Write Poems prompt.

The Walking Dead

Once you slurred me the story
of your overdose – your heart
stopped on the cutting table
before the doctors brought you back
to life. You never got over it,
prone to random fits of rage as if
they’d failed to reconnect your soul,
as if your heart resented
the resurrection, begrudging its beating
as much as you dreaded getting out of bed
each day, rising only to the stiff hope
of another drink to recreate the escape.
How I wished you’d go ahead and take
your reservation in some dowdy afterlife
bar like you’d been trying so hard
to do for all those years, so you
could reminisce in a ghost-webbed booth
and knock ‘em back for all eternity, dirty
shot glass clacking against the decay
of your teeth, chipped and gray
as old bathroom tiles.