“What’s Your Life Motto?”
By Ace Boggess
Survive your dreams, those treacherous things
that navigate night alleys
where even lurkers who mug you are afraid.
Your dreams have poison in them,
but make a colorful cocktail mixed with light.
They hum dirges.
They chant for your death & resurrection.
Your dreams trample you with a herd of lovely monsters.
Survive them by achieving,
dodging desperate thrusts of a spear.
*
Ace Boggess is the author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018). His writing appears in The Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Rattle, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison.
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