How It Begins

This is not how it begins.

He didn't kneel
in front of the older man
and put his mouth
on the spigot.

Instead, he paced
the hundred paces of
the room, breathing

like a goldfish
in a matchbox.

His fear that
rusted to guilt.

That guilt that bleached
the faces off
his paper gods.

He doesn't remember
any of this.

Instead, it's a square
of light at the edge
of his fiction
that he thinks of.

By Jerome Kugan

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