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      June 10, 2021Robert FungeWhy

      You could call me obsessed
      or a fool. There’s no future
      turning your insides out
      arranging words until they’re
      comfortable with each other.
      And the pay! Just this morning
      a check arrived in the mail
      for fifteen dollars, for a poem
      it took forty years to write.
      Standing on the corner
      looking hungry and tired, the
      Veteran of a Thousand Wars
      does better on a bad day.
      I show you
      how I feel inside, how my daughter
      whores for drug money, and my son
      ransoms his future for a soul.
      I tell you how my father
      forgot my name, and my mother
      went to the electric table
      to have her mind rearranged.
      I tell you how I prayed for grace
      and was given pain, to show
      that all prayers are answered.
      I’ve shown you how I died
      three times, yet here I am,
      Lazarus and Buddha, my
      victim and savior. All this
      for fifteen dollars and a year’s
      subscription. If I didn’t have a job
      at the factory, sweeping floors
      on the graveyard shift …
      And I’ve shown
      where I buried myself, covered
      my walls with books and paintings,
      how I talk to them and they say
      This is what you’ve always wanted.
      I am my prisoner and my warden.
      I tell you how a passing image
      makes me rise, and how love
      leaves me cold. I sleep alone
      in a king-size bed
      and spill myself. I confess
      in public. I publish my shame.
      I don’t judge anymore.
      I’ve forgotten how to pray, unless
      this is a prayer.
      And now I arrange my life
      in code, knowing you decipher
      more than I show.
      They can keep
      their fifteen dollars. They insult me!
      All I want from life
      is sainthood and some poems
      that will last. I lied early:
      the future is all there is. My gift
      is my present to myself, this day’s
      condensation of memory.
      It saves my life.

      from Issue #15 - Summer 2001

      Robert Funge

      “I live alone in a library. I’m retired and busier than ever. I write poems to make sense of the past, and because it’s fun. Always both. These poems reflect his life, his imagination and his idiocrasy.”