Bob King | 3 Works

How Often Do You Think About How Good of a Life You’ve Been Living?

Never said the one lying next to me,
& Often the priest & Sometimes said
the woman on Netflix trying to decide
how so many things went so drastically
wrong so quickly, as if… life… once stable
& constant… is obligated to stay steady
& constant—the protagonist knocks
over baskets of oranges as she tumbles
over-&-over, down limestone stairways.
Stairways have been bad for my family:
my brother a broken arm he still blames
me for, my daughter her foot at two
years old, one of the cutest casts ever,
& Mom with her neck—she shouldn’t
have been able to walk again with those
off kilter vertebrae. That same spine.
Let alone breathe. Who isn’t stubborn
as bones? Loud as a heart, sometimes too?
Who isn’t far away from being an
orthopedist’s teaching model? With his
retractable pointer, You’ve been broken
here. Possibly also here & here, but you’ll
need to call the central scheduler to treat
that body part that’s more electricity
& art than it is flesh. I only do every day,
I replied to Bridget. She squinted, stared,
& then dropped her bare shoulders,
clavicles pushing up, straining taught,
threatening her skin—as if in a final
understanding about my life-long-daily
energy expenditure, & she nestled
her skull deeper into her pillow
& slipping into sleep, Why?
Don’t think. Just be, Bob. Just be.


+ Inspired by Game of Thrones, Season 6 (2016).

At Home

Because you’re direct, often blunt, & without metaphor, you prefer doors. The giant kind. The Venetian or Florentine kind that’s a few meters tall by a couple meters wide & likely is virgin forest thick oak or walnut with a brass lionhead & huge ring knocker—the brass likely cast from scrap, leftovers in the artist’s studio from another project commissioned by the church & so the artist got to make a little unexpected more off what he didn’t use. The kinds of doors you stand in front of & take pictures of & will make hefty memories of. Loneliness is the cause of so much of the world’s misunderstanding, which then quickly devolves into hate, war, hangings, or bombs. I’m more of a windows guy, myself, & because of the way the sunlight filters through stained glass in odd shapes & at random angles, I had to disassemble a panel at a time, & squeeze through a corresponding shape, color, & texture of me, as if a children’s 3-D toy puzzle, placing corresponding with corresponding, until I was finally inside & put back together with lead or gumption—not really until you had made your way up the ornate & sprawling staircase, finding me in pieces at the base of the window seat. A nearly perfect window to read by. Recomposed, we looked for the bedroom together.


+ Inspired by At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (2010).

Ponte Vecchio

If the cell towers stopped transmitting
& the landlines went dead & even
the faxes & telegraphs & limelights
across the English Channel went dark,
& zombie apocalypse or nuclear holocaust
or unmastered atmospheric comet—
in a way no one—not even Kissinger
or Bismark—thought possible….
If the whole world went straight down
the toilet or into a Longaberger Basket—
if all of this went right to hell, where’s
the one place that I could count on
you to meet me at? The desserts &
coffee will keep me company until
you arrive. Or vice versa. And despite
all the chaos, we’ll wait & wait & wait
for each other there.


+ Inspired by Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (2020), World War Z by Max Brooks (2006), Exploring and Mapmaking by Dr. Ian Jackson (2006), & Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson (2015).