Come Home to Poem

I used to come home
Throw my bag down
Excited to write a poem
With gel pen in new journal
About a boy, about a feeling
Letting homework wait while
At the coffee table kneeling
Scrawled away a story
In so many words.
 
Creating little paper tantrums
Rhyme-y but insubstantial
Many ho-hums and humdrums
Described but not directed
No concrete imaginings
Only whiney abstracted ideas
Without pictures fastening
A reader to the ground
As though I wasted words.
 
Did I feel more at twelve-years-old?
Or were my hands just more willing
To honor those emotions’ hold
And not worry about mistakes
Now it’s To-Dos, number crunches
No soliloquizing on backs of heads
Or furtive glances at lunches
Avoiding calculations and essays
Using up so many words.

This work by Sarah Holmes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License