Sometimes people die but of course they do
all the time, not the same people that is and not the all at once and not really all the time--each in his own time, or hers--and as for people who croak at exactly the same moment, think of them as a kind of twins, or is that kinds of twins and I'm flunking fourth grade again but my Sunday School teacher says that things would be much worse and even the death of me if I fail God's Great Test and I should've asked her what that is exactly but I couldn't think beyond her smile and I'm ten years old to her 25 but is this love, the kind that starts off babies, I mean? I'm dying.
I’ll go to Heaven when I die but just
my soul and the catch is that I may not get to stay forever, forever as in eternally because God has to judge me and if I don't pass His muster then I have to go to Hell to suffer eternally as well, I think, without any hope for promotion, to Heaven that is, and certainly not to life as I know it right now here on Earth at ten years old, I mean that I'm 10, not the Earth, my Sunday School teacher says the Earth is 6,000 years old but at regular school it's a Hell of a lot older and I don't feel so young whichever way.
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Reed, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, The Font, Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review and many other journals in a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives. Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.
