First Communion was all about enduring
how withered my hands had become
from seemingly endless prayer.

Of course, before that
I had to get right with God:
the eight year old had to confess his sins.

The confessional I understood
mostly by thinking of it
as God’s phone booth.

Here’s what I learned there:
never mind fancy theology.
If you repeat your sins,

there’s a number
that will make them
go away.

Back then there were priests
in our parish whose hands
were withered from praying,

from preying. (I had friends
who had their number,
but they didn’t go away.)

I knew nothing of this.
No one ever touched me
because I wasn’t a good enough Catholic

to get close enough.
Never was an altar boy,
and as soon as I could, I got out.

I’m a poet now,
still in love with
the confessional:

tell a few of your sins to someone,
do it again and again, pretend
to walk away cleansed.

As for my friends:
some got away cleansed,
at least a little. Some didn’t.

Some of them don’t live at all anymore —
unlike those priests who remain
tucked away out of sight, out of mind —

never mind your fancy theology:
I guess if you peel off a good number of prayers,
or whatever else you’ve got, it all goes away.