I’m almost positive that I’m dying.
Don’t laugh.
It’s not a joke.
I haven’t told my wife yet and I expect,
at your age,
you should be able to keep a secret.
I’m away from home,
working graveyards,
checking soft hotels
and burned out,
punched out
apartment complexes.
The someday massacre is still somewhere up ahead.
I don’t know how far.
For my father, it was close.
It was right in front of his face.
That’s why my step mother hid his gun.
He died with an addiction to palliative opiates
and a feeding tube buried in his abdomen.
Now I have his gun hidden away in a cabinet.
And I have a beehive in my colon,
or a patch of poison sumac,
or maybe my guts
are tearing themselves apart in disgust.
I’m new to dying.
It’s my first time, I think.
I doubt I’m any better at it
than I am at writing poetry,
which isn’t really saying much.
I’m alive now.
I’m out til six.
Boss’s orders.
When I’m finished, I’ll go home to my wife.
I’ll listen to her breathe
and watch her sleep.
The someday massacre will seem far away then
no matter how badly my guts hurt.
And it will be enough.
This poem originally appeared in Locust Review 9 print edition. Social media splash image by Tish Turl and Adam Turl. Locust Review 9 cover by Adam Ray Adkins.
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