July 25, 2025: “My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead,” Day Off, “Why I Swore Off Porn”

I’m not sure I’d want to speak with ghosts.  I think it would be either really terrifying, or really annoying.  There are always things left unsaid when a person passes—unspoken “goodbyes” or “I loves yous” or “Don’t forget to unplug the toasters.”  I’m just not sure I’d want to be the conduit for all those messages from the beyond.

Sharon Olds’ has a close encounter with her father’s ghost . . . 

My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead

by: Sharon Olds

I seem to have woken up in a pot-shed, 

on clay, on shards, the glitter paths 

of slugs kiss-crossing my body. I don't know 

where to start, with this grime on me. 

I take the spider glue-net, plug 

of the dead, out of my mouth, let's see 

if where I have been I can do this. 

I love your feet. I love your knees, 

I love your our my legs, they are so 

long because they are yours and mine 

both. I love your—what can I call it, 

between your legs, we never named it, the 

glint and purity of its curls. I love 

your rear end, I changed you once, 

washed the detritus off your tiny 

bottom, with my finger rubbed 

the oil on you; when I touched your little 

anus I crossed wires with God for a moment. 

I never hated your shit—that was 

your mother. I love your navel, thistle 

seed fossil, even though 

it's her print on you. Of course I love 

your breasts—did you see me looking up 

from within your daughter's face, as she nursed? 

I love your bony shoulders and you know I 

love your hair, thick and live 

as earth. And I never hated your face, 

I hated its eruptions. You know what I love? 

I love your brain, its halves and silvery 

folds, like a woman's labia. 

I love in you 

even what comes 

from deep in your mother—your heart, that hard worker, 

and your womb, it is a heaven to me, 

I lie on its gentle hills and gaze up 

at its rosy vault. 

I have been in a body without breath, 

I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged 

chimney, in the air over the earth, 

and buried in the earth, and pulled down 

into the ocean—where I have been 

I understand this life, I am matter, 

your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you 

I mean look down at your hand, move it, 

that action is matter's love, for human 

love go elsewhere.

I have had dreams/visions, like Olds, of waking up in strange places and speaking with a long-dead loved one—most of the time, one of my sisters or my mother.  I’ve found those dreams both comforting and disturbing, depending on the loved one’s words.

I always feel surrounded by my dead.  In fact, I sometimes talk to them.  Not in the Whoopi Goldberg Ghost way.  I just have one-sided conversations with them when I’m struggling with a decision.  My mother and older sister were always sounding boards for me when I needed advice.  

I do believe in ghosts/spirits/souls.  From a Christian standpoint, I was brought up to believe we all have souls that survive our fleshly time on this planet.  From a Stephen King fanboy standpoint, I will never knowingly step foot in a haunted house.  From a metaphysical standpoint, I have experienced moments of intense connection with the spirit of a place/person.  (I defy anyone to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and not feel the weight of all the lives that were lost there.)

The image of my dearly departeds constantly floating near me gives me pause.  Think about everything you do on a daily basis.  Would you want your mother or father to witness all the things you do in a 24-hour period?  As a teenage boy, I couldn’t imagine my maternal grandmother watching me at night in my bedroom.  The very thought was enough to make me celibate.

Nowadays, I’m comforted by the growing list of ghosts who surround me daily.  (As you get older, more and more ghosts join that throng.)  It’s like I have my own team of angelic lawyers to argue my case with the Almighty.  If I’m doing something that requires privacy, I figure my dead are smart enough to practice some otherworldly discretion.

I took the day off work, so I’ve had a lot of time to write and think today, which can be both good and bad.  I worked on my poetry manuscript, and I practiced church music for this weekend.  At the entrance to one of the churches, there’s a lovely flower garden with statues of angels and Jesus and Mary.  The temperature was close to 90 degrees, and blooms were vibrant and fragrant.  I stood outside for several minutes, just inhaling and thinking how much my mother would have loved the scene.  It almost felt like her ghost was standing right beside me, admiring the orange and while petals.  

Saint Marty wrote a poem about good and bad choices, based on the following two prompts from The Daily Poet:

July 24:  Write a poem in which the title begins with “Why.”  Examples:  “Why I’d Like to Meet My Maker,” “Why I Would Never Dye My Hair.”  In her poem “Why She Would Take Off Her Shoes Before Jumping From the Golden Gate Bridge,” Annette Spaulding-Convy writes:  Maybe the water / / is a temple and She doesn’t want / / to bring the road’s dirt / / inside.  Push to move past expected responses to strange and imaginative ones.  For extra credit, compose your poem in couplets.

July 25:  Write a poem wherein you swear off something or someone.  Examples:  caffeine, booze, porn, Sex in the City reruns, a toxic boyfriend or girlfriend, a drug-addicted child.  Tell us specifically (with concrete images) why you are saying goodbye to a bad habit or toxic alliance, then show us how your decision will change your life for the better.

Why I Swore Off Porn

by: Martin Achatz

It was challenging in high school, like getting

someone to buy me beer from White’s Liquor Pantry.

The girls always looked sad, as if

Charlotte hadn’t saved Wilbur in the end.

And the guys always looked like Darren Vanhoff

who tried to drown me in swim class.

There were too many grammar errors—

modifiers dangling in inappropriate places.

Princess Leia, in her metal bikini, strangled

Jabba the Hutt with her BDSM chains.

They’re aren’t many good words that rhyme

with it:  corn, shorn, mourn, forlorn, 

and Gorn, that lizard man Captain Kirk

fought in between getting it on with all

those alien pole dancers in sequins, 

trying to save their worlds from oblivion.

Everyone in the pictures and videos have

mothers, fathers, little brothers, maybe goldfish.

Hi, my name is Martin, and my turn-ons are someone

washing my dinner dishes, afternoon naps, salted caramels.

April 20: Daddy's Going to Kill You, Sharon Olds, "The Father," New Cartoon

"Daddy's going to kill you.  He's going to kill you," she said.

Holden doesn't have a great relationship with his father.  His dad is a highly successful corporate lawyer who produces Broadway shows.  Holden is his middle son who can't seem to get his crap together.  Holden's sister, Phoebe, knows that Holden and their father have issues.  When she finds out Holden has been kicked out of school again, her immediate response is simple:  "Daddy's going to kill you."

As I informed you earlier this week, Sharon Olds just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Stag's Leap.  I don't own a copy of Stag's Leap yet, but I do own a copy of her book The Father, a collection of poems about her relationship with, you guessed it, her father.  The poems are full of beauty and pain, detailing a father/daughter bond that is fraught with complications.  The father in the poems is dying of cancer, and the speaker is caring for him during his final days.  As can be expected, the situation stirs up all the emotions, deep and raw, harbored throughout a lifetime.

One of the deepest poems of The Father is about words, the final shared exchange between daughter and father:

Last Words

Three days ago, my suitcases
were hunched there, in his hospital room,
in the corner, I had to pick them up
by the scruff of their necks, and leave him.  I kept
putting them down, and going back
to kiss him again although he was exhausted,
shining like tarnished silver, and yet
I could not seem to pick up those bags
and walk out the door the last time.  I kept
going back to the mouth he would lift, his
forehead glittering with effort, his eyes
slewing back, shying, until
finally he cried out Last kiss!
and I kissed him and left.  This morning, his wife
called to tell me he has ceased to speak,
so those are his last words to me,
the ones he is leaving me with--and it is ending with a kiss--
a command for mercy, the offer of his cracked
creator lips.  To plead that I leave,
my father asked me for a kiss!  I would not
leave till he had done so, I will not let thee go except thou beg for it.

It's a holy moment, a sacred thing, the last words exchanged between child and father.  The very last line of the poem is filled with ancient yearnings, the inability to surrender, to let go, of father love.  Not all of the poems are this tender.  The love expressed in Sharon Olds' poems is tough, hard as permafrost.  It doesn't melt easily.  It distills, warms over time into something alive and nurturing at the end of the book, where the father has the last word.  The poem, titled "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead," concludes,

...
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean--where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter's love, for human
love go elsewhere.

It's a comforting moment, an extension of father love into something beyond matter and time, into eternity.


The Father fills Saint Marty with hope for love never dies.  It transforms into something deeper, like snow into melt into earth into lilacs, like words into kiss into memory into poetry.

Confessions of Saint Marty