As The Poems Go Into the Thousands

As the Poems Go into the Thousands

It dawns on you over a second cup of coffee,

like the slow yet certain sunrise through a rain-washed window,

that the stack of your poems has become a paper tower,

one that teeters precariously on the very notion of

accomplishment.

All these words, a grand parade of inky soldiers,

yet what they've conquered seems hardly more than

the common trifles of existence—

a splash of rain on the back of a neck,

or sunlight playing a game of tag with the leaves.

They've danced in and out of the traffic of life,

a life measured conveniently in years and days,

rounded like the edges of a well-worn coin,

spent in the company of countless faces,

those silent composers of our narrative.

And before the gentle tap of the space bar echoes

a brief interlude, an exit stage left, if you will,

one must nod to the simple truth

that leaving behind these lines is lighter, far lighter,

than the living within them, the crafting of each tender phrase.

With fingers hesitating like a suspended raindrop,

I listen to the piano notes fluttering from the radio,

an invisible maestro spilling out his soul in waves.

Oh, the best of us seldom crowd the air with syllables,

content to let a few chosen notes linger in the clearing,

while those with the least to say are often the ones

most allergic to the tranquility of silence,

pouring words out like a waterfall with no end.

Indeed, those masters of brevity whisper to the eager page,

leaving behind just enough—a footprint on the path,

a breath on the mirror—beckoning us forward,

out of the haze of verbosity and into the clear day,

where poems count not in thousands, but in countless shifts

of the heart and mind, ever so lightly, they go.