Three Poems
by Gale Acuff
I love everybody but I'm only
ten years old, I haven't had enough time
really to learn how to hate although I
can say that I hate English peas, and beets,
and romance comic books like my sister
loves, and lopsided, one-sided ball games
except, I guess, to be fair, when my team
is winning, and an action hero who
kisses when he should be killing, of course
not the woman, unless she draws down first,
her pistol that is, or trains her rifle
on him, but (Look out!) when for her he falls
he's lost forever--funny how love is,
folks don't hold back, that is if it is love.
If it's solely sex sometimes that stops them.
When you're dead you're never really dead says
my Sunday School teacher, there's the After
-life where somehow you live eternally
—go figure—in Heaven or Hell, Heaven
is the livelier place but anyway
to live forever first you have to die
and I don't want to, I don't want to die,
I want to live forever, sure, but for
-ever down here on Earth and never grow
old I should add but then again what's so
bad about old age even if you don't
get around as well as you did so if
you die and get reborn in Heaven
that's not really fair, it kills old age so
I guess that death leads a life of its own.
One day when I'm dead I'll laugh about all
this, life I guess I mean and all the stuff
that worries the pee out of me but now
that I'm defunct it doesn't seem so bad,
I guess that's what real forgiveness is, of
sins, I mean, like my Sunday School teacher
swears and she swears it like she means it, swears
it's like it's gospel to us ten-year-olds
so after class this morning I told her
what I think and she frowned like God will frown
when I die and my soul goes there to be
judged, Heaven that is, but I left the room
before she could send me to Hell, it's not
like I don't have a head start and not like
she’s not already way ahead of me.
Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.
