Why I Write

The train finally arrived.

In a mother's arms for safekeeping was a little boy sleeping,

She carried the weight of his charmed, helpless state.

The beauty of trust in its most primal form,

Took me by surprise as I stood at the platform.

And I thought to myself,

This is why I write.

I stumbled along the shore.

As lightning flashed and stormy waves crashed,

Nature in her wrath unleashed the fury she hath.

The earth has music of a different kind,

And ocean depths have melodies to find.

What a privilege to witness this chaos, I thought,

As my inflated sense of self came to naught.

This is why I write.

Then he pulled me closer

With urgency in his kiss like he’d been waiting for this

Brief encounter after years, when loneliness disappears.

Love needs a time machine; life’s remote, a pause

To go back to these moments and relive them because

Cars on the highway go by too fast,

And holding onto something won’t make it last.

Ever so often, life causes me to feel

Things I can’t fully express, yet cannot conceal.

So I immortalize them like a picture in a frame,

An inscription on a park bench with a date and a name.

For when that picture in the frame gets softened by dust

And my lucky penny begins to rust,

I’ll have these words to bring respite.

Words are my time machine -

And this is why I write.