I’d like to think the Bogeyman is dead,

that age has turned me like a noble grape

into a richer wine to match the bread,

so long-matúred, a snoot fit for a crepe,

that I might be the one one true in faith

might pick to bless and drink in Someone’s name,

and, fortified, no monster, creep, or wraith

could fast uncork the years to taste my shame

and let my notes of apple dribble out.

I’ve learned I’m still the toddler told a lie

to make me “good”—no ice cream if I pout—

but bullies won’t be scolded if I cry.

I went to school for decades, as did you,

and learned we grown-ups fear the Boo-gey, too.

The landscape has a sharp and jagged slope,

and I stand on the high ground; I defer

to you to best slip from the noose from rope

you give a man. (I can not envy her.)

But when I saw the gander flock to you,

and her, and her, and peck, and flap, and squawk,

and I balled up a page of verse and threw

it in your lap, and shrugged, and turned to walk…

At times, it’s feel a pang or grow a fang,

a glance rocked aft to turn my heart to salt,

the fearful expectation of a “bang!”

or gorges cleaving at the seismic fault.

The birds, as well, believe in poetry.

I honk, and flail, and raise my neck to thee.

The antidote to shame is, welcome shame.

Heap boulders on your chest—endure the pain—

until, to breathe, you’d sacrifice your name,

but something takes a breath inside your brain,

and pauses at the height, as if to speak,

and says, “There’s nothing for it, now, at all?”

“‘Salvation’ is the death cry of the weak.”

“We are not wrong to cry it—still we fall.”

“And, if it does not matter, live for you.”

“What would you do? These minutes are for you.”

I’d heard what “freedom” meant, but never knew.

“What would you do? These moments are for you.”

I cried; I laughed; at last I found relief

with seven billion gods and one belief.

I will not love you like Neruda’s verse.

I can’t; I always watched a goddess go.

Her ghost will be the last to quit my hearse.

My love is like an empty coffin, though,

cremated in Her stead, kept in an urn

I buried prematurely, in my haste

to have another vanity to burn.

My love is countless eulogies in waste,

a bitter sip to cure what feels like health.

Although, to Her, whom frankness might disarm,

perhaps my love could be a tarnished wealth

of copper liberties and silver charms.

My love is not a furnace or a rod;

my love’s the honesty most save for God.

The ill adjust to sickness, madness, death

that they are taught they cannot overcome—

no One can overcome, that draws One breath,

but this One is my god, alike in sum.

When did We look the cancer in the face

and lay before it all Our pre- and post-

and present tense of Endless Holy Space

within an Honest, Kindly Ghost—at most,

imperfect spinning wheels and grinding gears,

a cuckoo springing twenty past the ‘our,

that knows by sense of Beauty, right it hears

is right if Kindness is the highest pow’r.

The doctor, of Us All, felt most relieved—

we said She had a cure, and She believed.

As duck-faced lonely hearts fly right and left,

I have to take offense at the belief

that my or any love, not whol’ bereft

of even the pretense of a fig leaf

before the void that’s shaped just like my head,

could base the book review on just a page—

no less, osmose its better parts in bed—

but such is the voracious modern age.

I’ll ask if you believe in god and why,

(I’ll use the lower case, but “ask my ‘ex’…”)

and if the thing you’ll say will make me cry,

I’ll genuflect, and then I’ll think of sex.

I have no organ for it, by design;

She cut it off, and now I feel just fine.