Out, Damn Candle

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That’s the challenge posed by W3#225 at The Skeptics Kaddish

Epigram
He cleared off forty years ago
And now he’s back as candle glow.
Damn! She wasn’t having that —
She snuffed it under the kitchen tap.

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Poem
It’s typical of him, of course, to make a grand return
Lurking on a birthday cake and refusing not to burn.
You spend four decades having fun, you party and you flirt
And then his ghost disrupts your tea and ruins the dessert.
He couldn’t call or write a text –
Instead he does this stupid thing, no wonder you feel vexed.
He waits till seventy-eight, when you are settled in,
To turn up as a flickering flame and lecture you on sin.
“Oh, sweetypie,” the candle sighs, melodramatic spark!
It thinks you tragic as it whispers in the dark.
But women of a certain age have far too much to do
To waste the night in dialogue with the likes of you.
We’ve done the laundry, fed the cat, and pulled up all the weeds;
And forty-year-old phantoms are not the sort of thing one needs.
They never do the washing up, they never pay the rent,
They just turn up to reminisce on how their youth was spent.
You don’t need a prancing flame whose whining’s histrionic.
Get with the program, girl – just pour a gin and tonic,
Eat the cake, and put that blasted flame
Under the kitchen tap and wash it down the drain.

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Epilogue
Gloria Gaynor got it right but didn’t go far enough:
Surviving’s good, but living well’s the real rebuff.
You can stuff your sorry mawkish grieving – 
How daft I was to go believing
Even one of your stupid little lies.
Your life’s a joke and now, -surprise! –
You want someone to take care of you?
Well, yes, my dear, of course you do.
Too late for that, my former chum – 
I’ve had enough of being dumb.
Life’s far too good to ever waste
On twerps like you. Now make haste.
Take your sickly “sweetypie” –
I’ve got a life to live. “Goodbye”

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Georges de La Tour, The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame
“Gloria Gaynor got it right but didn’t go far enough.”

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Palate Cleanser

First Fig 
My candle burns at both ends;
   It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
   It gives a lovely light!

  — Edna St. Vincent Millay