EVERYTHING WAS OKAY
By John Garmon
Everything was okay
Until your mother died
Then you said we didn’t connect
Anymore
I felt briefly suspended
Hanging above hanging
In the asteroid belt
Everything was okey
Until combustion
And fragmentation
The collision shook
My vision of myself
You continued sad
Remembering your mother
What was her whereabouts
Do people die completely
Blow everything to bits
Then you can start over
You’ll be surprised
How it easy it is
EVERYTHING
John Garmon is an 85-year-old former president of Berkeley City College, former Marine, former Uber and Lyft driver, native Texan who hasn't been there in over 30 years, novelist with 40+ books, poems in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Commonweal, Oddball Magazine, The Florida Review, The Oregonian, Southern Humanities Review, Radius, New Mexico Humanities Review, Oyster River Pages, Assisi, Poet Lore, South Dakota Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. He was named poet of the year by the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Society of Florida, in 2000, and served as the featured author/poet at the John Foix Festival in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, 1986. Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Ball State University.
