I am a father who has no son
but sits beside someone
who bears the names I gave him.
I have a son who has no father.
He straddles the wall politely,
paints over the wind of my advice.
I am a son who has no father.
Lessons taught are lessons fought
to name which Humpty Dumpty
is hardest of shell.
Robert S. King, a Georgia native, now lives in the mountains near Hayesville, NC. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. He has published three chapbooks (When Stars Fall Down as Snow, Garland Press 1976; Dream of the Electric Eel, Wolfsong Publications 1982; and The Traveller’s Tale, Whistle Press 1998). His full-length collections are The Hunted River and The Gravedigger’s Roots, both in their second editions from FutureCycle Press, 2012; and One Man’s Profit (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013).