The disease of more grabs us late
at night, convincing us there’s
something better out there than what we have.

Women and men chase their tails
and other men and women around
in circles risking jail cells, nut houses
and all that rhymes with misery and
broken dreams.

Sexual security is on the line, “the right
to choose” so powerful and inviting
so why can’t I go back on a promise?

Abuse is another thing. Child safety
and your own as we leave in quiet
darkness before he comes back home.

“I’ve had it with her binges,” he says.
Conveniently, he’s met somebody else.

The grass is never greener on the other
side, just vulnerable to the elements
as much as any other grass.

Children bearing the brunt, finding
ways to understand including drugs and
alcohol, the suicidal thoughts streaming
in with other questions about my existence.

“Maybe it’s not meant to be. I was not
meant to be.” They left me….

Ha!!! I cringe when they ask on buses or
trains, “Where are your parents?” Maybe I’ll
make up a story that they live happily
in my heart. I’ll make it true by decorating
the grave of my alcoholic imagination until
revived, I walk out of the plot to
haunt poetry readings with humor and
good cheer, because…

Because I am proof that Mom and Dad were
here, and in me they were never divorced,
cannot be.

“Man cannot separate what God has bound
together.” My parents are not divorced, and so
when asked for now on about the status
of my earthly creators, I shall say with that
Frostian sigh: “Married these fifty years. Struggling
to see it in a long imagist vacation into ‘Mo Betta’, the
disease of more and other people, places and things.
Festus and Bacchus, the Devil’s black hole.”

For ages hence I’ll say: here I am