The idea is knowing I can go somewhere, and I am
creating the first pattern of steps no one has ever traveled before.
Whatever path I take, it will be an original, moves made only by me,
through a crowded city, walking around in widening circles,
then down an alley, up a stairway, out a back exit,
returning to a main thoroughfare, on to where the sidewalk ends,
then taking off along a country road, rounding a tree,
taking photos looking up through its leaves,
putting my arms around its trunk to feel its chi,
heading off through tall grass, a trek on no beaten trail,
meandering down to a pristine shore, no footsteps there,
touching and tasting the ocean here where I may be sipping
a water molecule once a part of me, many years ago,
drawing pictures in the sand with a soaked stick of driftwood
floated here a hundred or a thousand miles, hiking over a dune
and down into a black bamboo forest, where I hear bars of a new song
in the moving leaves only I will ever hear.
With each step forward, from the time I leave me house,
to the time I return, key in the lock and stepping through the doorway,
I like to think no one has taken the exact same journey I have,
seen or heard the same sights and sounds I have as I
write my life’s story constantly along the way in my mind,
keep it so I can take again the journey only I have made,
a private screening to run through my mind,
when I sit in the middle of a noisy crowd of everything the same.
Lanning Lee 