My name is Padre Gautuma and one of the things I love about poetry is how it can collapse

so many different things that happened in your life across different periods of your

life, the past, the present and the future even, into one poem.

And in this way you're facing the pain of yourself in the past and hopefully the increasing

healing of yourself now and the person you want to be and the person you will become.

And all of those are in some kind of conversation with each other.

It doesn't make it easy but it does make it powerful.

Essay on reentry by Reginald Duane Bats.

At 2 a.m. without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know to keep my mouth shut,

my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box, a spell, a kind of incantation I was

under, not whiskey but history.

I robbed a man.

This month before he would drop bucket after bucket on opposing players, the entire bedraggled

bunch five and six and he leaping as if every layup erases something.

That's how I saw it, my screaming, coaching, sweating, presence recompense for the pen.

My father has never seen me play ball as part of this.

My oldest new told of my crimes by a stranger.

Tell me we aren't running towards failure is what I want to ask my sons but it is two

in the a.m.

The oldest has gone off to dream in the comfort of his room.

The youngest despite him seeming more lucid than me just reflects cartoons back from his

eyes.

...