Loved To Death

Grandma smoked like a dragon on the gazebo,
hearing her estranged daughter praise a placebo—
“Love is the strongest drug a doctor knows,”
she said, fanning the fumes from her nose.
“It keeps you well and happy and strong,”
but she coughed as if sucking from a bong.
Her children, meanwhile, played in the garden,
laughing and crying and begging pardon.
“Maybe so,” the beldam said, still chugging,
“but it’s bad for your heart, all that hugging.”
“You can’t mean that, momma,” her daughter said.
Grandma meant it: “Love will kill you stone-dead.”
On cue, her grandchildren leapt onto her back—
she died of a hug, and a heart-attack.

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