Miraculously, I have found enough words
all month long to fill unturned pages turned,
my daily worry, heavy as a dreaming child’s head
drooling against a math class desktop last March.
Sometimes they dash wildly, the energetic ones
who run from me like dogs whose leashes
I let slip to make their winning letter war on paper,
my pen cutting up so much mightier than any sword.
Sometimes not, the all too tame, squirting from me
like toothpaste from an all but empty tube, squeezed
and squeezed as if there were hardly enough to brush
my yellow fangs white a whole never, forget till next April.
I sit back now, figure paper weight plus ink weight
must equal enough for the same pound a penny’s in,
thirty days of air, maybe, an income enough to pay not
even the odd bus fare for when my poems can’t walk me.
Lanning Lee 