---

FREE SUBSCRIBE
For updates on new essays, poems, diatribes, photo essays, experimental videos & sorta memoir excerpts, subscribe to this site’s free e-mail newsletter: TheStoryIsTheThing.substack.com

---

---

“The Religion of Want”

By Douglas John Imbrogno

---

1.

How hard it is to dream,
to dream well. Besieged by
wants, missing what’s not

there. Wanting what we
cannot have, or could, at a
high cost of misery.

On the old bedroom wall,
painted the between-blue-
and-green of a robin’s egg,

Christ the Lord, not my
saviour, maybe yours,
pleads into a beam of

moonlight. Or perhaps
it is the flashlight eyebeam
of his distant father.

There, in the Garden of
Gethsemane, where so
many problems for the

world began. Pleads for
release from his
obligations, pleads for 

strength to carry on?
Pleads for his eternal life
(but isn’t that an oxymoron?)

---

2.

Anyway, panties on the
bed refract a man’s attention
to more secular aims, the

religion of want, a complex
cosmology, in its own right.
The baseboard heater ticks

and clicks to life, like a
bebop piano player, tuning
up. The half-slice of moon

the color of provolone,
dodges in between the
scattered clouds

above the dark hills of
West Virginia, this cool
October night. Here

comes the fog, in the
dips of the road, concealing
the world from itself.

….

2012 | porter’s fork, west virginia