Staircase, an E-chapbook of poems honoring my late brother Francis Eugene Flynn

 

We called him Frank, of course, and out of the five Flynn boys he was born fourth. I've tried to honor his life in this elegiac collection of poems that focuses on a man, specifically Frank, building a staircase one step, one tread at a time, to code, his mind racing, his mind at ease. 

Frank was like that. Mercurial, and certainly never dull. 

Frank was a mariner, at one time the co-owner of Dania Boat Marina and the most successful seller of Yamaha outboard motors on the entire eastern US seaboard. He was also a licensed general contractor, a Coast Guard veteran, a crackerjack mason, a certified and self-taught masonry engineer, a carpenter, a biker, (he owned a number of Harleys and his own shop for a while), a cyclist (he was riding ten miles a day in south Florida within a week of his death) and a ladies man who married three times. 

Few of us ever thought he would die in his 40s, though no one who knew him thought Frank led a droll tiresome existence. On the contrary, he took all that life gave him by the horns and he wrestled with it, he struggled, he triumphed, and though he may have left us too soon, he certainly did so as a champion of the underdog, the gritty hustler who never quits, the player who you want in your foxhole and as part of your team. 

Not a day passes when I don't miss him. He was Best Man at my wedding, 28 years ago as of this writing. I like to think he's happy knowing that my lovely wife and I are still together.

Thank you to Tony Sturtevant for the cover image. 

The chapbook can be found here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1144742

Frank stands tall with his gloved hand wrapped around the long spiked bill of the first and only sailfish I've ever caught. This was off the coast of Florida, not far from Key West. He was really happy for me that day. I was living in LA at the time, and hadn't seen him in many years. He was always happy when he took some one out fishing and that person actually caught something. 

He lived in greater Fort Lauderdale for 30 years and spent countless hours and days at sea. As the owner of a beatiful home that he renovated himself, and a marina, to boot, he liked to boast that he didn't own a boat or a yacht, not even a canoe, but he had access to plenty of them.

Here I'm with Frank to my right and both of us looking rather goofy one winter's day a long, long time ago.

Here is Frank with our niece, Alexa. Again, this was many years ago. He loved kids. Alexa, now married, has a beautiful daughter of her own.