A Poem On A Monday

I don't believe this one needs an introduction other than to say it's an oldie of mine.

First Impressions

Why does a butterfly lie low on a rock

at the edge of a gravel parking lot

not for minutes, but hours?  What about

a man, what possesses him to wear

a straw hat in wind on a bike with a flag

that spells out peace, love, anarchy? 

Maybe he woke one morning with a mind

for action, decided to wave

his life above his head. See him now,

unsure of himself for years and then

that morning in the shower, the idea

coming to him like a scent, how he

stood there and let the drunken water

wash over him. Years from now he’ll be

walking, laugh with the memory of that day. 

There he’ll be in a town laughing,

others will hear him and look, and what

will they think of him, a man with an unkempt

garden upstairs, a man in love, a bit of both? 

They won’t know how he laughs

at the mind, what it remembers.

We don’t know what anyone’s thinking,

all those tracks in the mind. There are

days we just need to start something, speak

words we’ve never mouthed before, sit

in a bar at two in the afternoon—elbows

on an oak slab, a tall one in hand—just me

and a cowboy sipping wine. I came

because I’ve never known a bar at this time

alone, came to drink in a place

where all that thinking goes down, who would know

this? It echoes like a coffin in here. I feel all those

ideas left behind as loose shirts.

Casey Lord