by Wandering Muse

Created on: April 05, 2010

I thought about today

and wrote a scattering of words:

Two images, 

Three colours or so,  Four smells,

Five lines to get the gist of the thing,

and since I had no time to make it finer,

I scrunched it up for later

stuffed it down into my pocket with

old barley sugar candies,

foreign coins and bits of random...

and, wearing the dregs of yesterday and

dreaming about tomorrow,

promptly forgot about the poem in my pocket.

And when I later found a wadded up ball of now dry paper,

forlorn at the bottom of my new washed jeans pocket,

I carefully unpeeled it and,

instead of

smudged ink spills and incomprehensible scribbles

I saw a pale five-line hasty memory

Which brought back the heart of the day I wrote it

One smell, one soft crumpled colour, one image

at a time, coming back slowly

like a developing photo.

The poem in my pocket had other things to say now-

it sported a coffee stain too, and it had settled into

a round pebble shape, picked up bits of the long day it had been

carried through, changing the gist of the five line memory.

It had become a traveler, needing a break, settling for a place to put its feet up,

waiting for a chance to speak to me of all it had seen,

and all it had endured and learned.

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