As I yawned my thoughts escaped me.
Involuntarily trapped within my wishful thinking,
I’d kept them prisoners, lest my companions
appreciate I was someplace else.
Now summoned by my boredom,
some audible phrase of 3 to 4 words
left my brain and ventured into the airways of human discourse
to be treated disdainfully by my associates,
adsorbed in their own words –
startled by my yawn to begin with.
Having intentionally been ignored
my thoughts travelled on the words,
through the air,
as if on the foot of a carrier pigeon.
On the way, they found shelter from a storm
within the beams of a barn
atop a field of once cut hay,
where he reached up before the pigeon could alight
and grasped the words within his calloused hands,
and contemplated the thoughts
as he directed the horses of the hay wagon
through the hillside fields, now fallow –
Where the thoughts were lost as he,
unloaded the bales onto the stack.
And somewhere in the farm fields of Iowa,
My thoughts lie crushed between two bales.
Fodder for a mushroom farm in the adjacent county.
Ray Brown
