Get Me To the Church on Time

I was hoping for a language-free moment,
a moment to discourage the word.

I was, as you know, a prisoner
to my tongue, could bite it.

In my upper room, a sermon
was playing about sundry. I hid

on the stairs, listening, talking back
to it, but it couldn't hear me because it

was talking. I let it.
What choice did I have?

It was a good one, what to do with old guns:
bury them in the cellar, one by one.

I grew attached to my upper air, slept
with a pillow near the ground, it was no

basement, anymore; they'd blasted the bottom
half of her, left me to untie my shoes

from a distance of seventy feet --
that was because I have a cut. Sorry,

I said, meaning it, but it was nothing
to make up for. Next time try taking it.

this poem was previously published in P.F.S. Post