Second Draft: Lost Poems

I help run the Fireside Reading Series (which I keep forgetting to promote here), and I have a standing rule that I will not read at the open mic unless I have written a new poem. I quite forgot that there was a reading tonight until I noticed it on Molly Lynn Watt's Facebook page, and of course, I hadn't written a new poem. I thought about this, fuming, all the way home from work, and about all the poems I'd had ideas for but never gotten the chance to write.

And that gave me an idea. So during dinner, I wrote the first draft of this poem on the back of an envelope and read it at the reading tonight. Here it is in its second draft.


Lost Poems

Where do they go,
those poems that whisper
in your ear
while you're driving
or working
or hip-deep in laundry?
Willful as soap bubbles,
they pop into existence,
then drift away, out of reach,
lost to cooking or taxes
or the mere lack of a pencil.

My lost poems
must be stashed
alongside single socks
and gloves, loosened buttons,
in a mislaid pocket of reality:
that verse about Abuela's tortillas,
a pair of shoes in the road,
pumpkins in a tree,
and countless more
too fleeting to form words,
ephemeral and real
as the scent of baking bread,
words, feelings, cadences
that wandered by
and left.

If there is a Heaven,
I want it to be a place
where I can gather my lost poems
like snowflakes on my tongue