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Morning Run
A friend asked me
“What do you think about
when you run?”
Sometimes nothing.
Sometimes, I compose
In my head.
Well, that’s all it took.
I’ve been a poet
For years.
Only nobody knew it.
Including me.
The poems were all composed in my
head.
And there they stayed.
They liked it there
In the dark.
It was comfortable, quiet.
But they’d get all tangled up
And what started out
As an orderly poem
Became a jumbled mess.
But then,
One day in June,
I sat down in the pasture
And a poem came out.
Then another.
Pretty
soon,
Everybody
Was rushing
For the exit.
That, of course,
Led to bottlenecks,
And fights.
“I wanna go first.”
“No, me.”
Pretty soon,
Lockdown.
Nobody came out.
Then, when I started running,
A truce was declared.
Poems began
Sorting themselves out.
Some created alliances,
Signed treaties,
Made agreements.
So now, when I run,
I sometimes have trouble
Because that’s the moment
A poem decides to come out.
But I’m not ready.
No paper, no pen,
So I have to run faster
To get home
So I don’t forget.
So I can grab the words
And fasten them
To the page
Before they escape
On a gust of wind
And fly into someone else’s head
And become their poem
And not mine.
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