When You Run
Locations
When you run with the earth
Pounding a drum against your souls
Heart beating faster
Breath coming quicker.
When you run from your mother’s womb
An alien to the world you entered
Eyes too oblique to see
But a mind too crazed to rest.
When you run as a stumble with new legs
To explore the world through your mouth
Putting your fingers in sockets they
Don’t belong shocking new experiences.
When you run into kindergarten, a desire to
Learn greater than the minimum height
Not reached at the traveling fair’s coaster
Moving out sooner than expected.
When you run from your high school
The hat thrown like the woes of transcripts
Only to crash back to the ground faster than the mortgage
The dull thump a gentle reminder.
When you run into love’s embrace
And fall too hard breaking your nose
Rosy glasses don’t quite fit the same
Leaving only remnants of your old nose.
When you run with your mind not body
The wisdom crashing against your rocky skull.
There’s no generators to harness the
Energy from the lapping waves.
When you run out
A car slowly chugging to a halt
Or a cut battery not starting back up
Or before reaching that destination
Where will you run?
To the plateaus or to the canyons?
To the worms to relish your callused feet?
To the sultry sound of a coronary?
When you ran like the dickens
But wished you read his expectations
Because we all twist in circles
Searching as Oliver for a center
When you ran on adrenaline
But wished you’d run on endurance
Because your hipster adrenal gland
Sent hormones before it was fashionable.
When you ran with tears watering
The lush grass beneath your feet
But the grass had been nourished
By the rains of yesterday’s oceans.
When you ran out of toothpaste
And your smile wasn’t pearly white
So you closed your chapped lips and
And suppressed the inborn grin.
When you ran your fingers over the dial pad
Fingering the the radio station’s number
But you were caller number 3, not 4
Knowing the answer just at the wrong time.
When you ran chills up a spine,
Because a touch is magnetic.
Plausibly pushing rather than pulling
But part of a greater force.
When you ran into a block
Realized it was a block, not a wall.
The mind is a tool for building
Not an obstacle causing destruction.
When you ran with scissors
Blamed, the man urging speed
No effort to mend your wounds or trust.
You thanked the nurse mitigating the pain.
When you ran with shoes
And your feet thought, why?
Your hair is free to lap your neck
But your feet constrained to bear your burden?
Will you have ran (running for time) before time ran out?