Sweet Potato Haircut

I wake and crawl to my desk, where the rising day awaits with its words and a fully charged laptop. I reach for the notebook from under my pillow and and I open my drawer and JUMP at the frenzy of PENS that come spilling forth, clattering across the floor into stiff heaps, cascading from the openings of my desk, an eagerly awaiting avalanche, like the pens were waiting for the day to rise so that I might touch their plastic bodies and let them finally, finally speak, forgetting that once the drawer is open, the pens are all vulnerable to my chronic, and tragic, abandonment of them as I leave them

in tall lawns of grass, in bathroom stalls and libraries,

on park benches and café window sills, in classrooms and grocery store isles,

I lose them to the enigmatic folds of my sheets

and the caverns of pockets,

I lose them to the wind and to the rain and to the crunch of car tires.

I leave them in the hands of strangers and friends,

they watch me walk away from them in gas stations

and yoga studios and restaurants,

doomed by their immobility.

Sweet pens. On this fresh, innocent morning, they clatter jubilantly at the day, and I watch regretfully, knowing many of them will be gone by the next sunrise.