By Michael Moran
You have to stop what you were doing a moment before,
stop your mid day run and stand there holding your phone,
mouthing these words softly to yourself. This little interrupting
poem shows up like the pause in a coin flip.
You can’t do anything else.
You are the passenger in my vehicle
and we are suddenly driving down a narrow pine lined dirt
road, with the tires scattering dust, flirting with the dense edges
of the path, and you watch me
horrified
as I remove my hands from the wheel
and cup them both over my eyes.
I used a soft tipped pen when I wrote these words for you today
because you will take them into your mouth and hum them into being.
A throated melody will carry them off, send them out with breath,
each syllable born for an instant from lips, tongue, and resonant breast,
the sharp tangles of the letters, softened, like tracks left in the snow.
In the poem, we can share in that same breath for a moment.
I can make you fall in love with me, gazing sleepily at this haphazard
handsome driver. You have no choice, you see, because you have
stopped what you were doing and you are mine for the briefest moment.
There’s no time to explain, get in the poem quickly.
Take off your robe, hoodie, fur hat, and horns.
Be the soft angles of watery tissue and humming bones
next to me, without a knife or gun or slogan or coup,
without context or distance, be the same with me for a moment.
Here, we will allow fleeting anger to collide with our perpetuities.
How long do we have left to run inside of this body?
Take a cool drink? Sweat through every pore?
Yearn over lost loves and found loves and future loves?
Not enough time, so I’ll make my point and let you go.
Can you picture both sides of a coin in your mind, or do you
Divide it in two images: heads and tails?
I can make you fall in love with me. Forget about our differences.
Who cares if you hardly know me. Does that even matter here?
At least that’s what I think, until you cup two hands over your own eyes
and I am suddenly alone in the car that is driving in a snowy field,
now long thin black lines of wheel trail, static between two servers,
suspended forever until you join me here again to find out if it was
heads or tails.
About the Author
Michael Moran is a writer at Pine Coffee & Cactus, his blog about discovering the world and himself through his adventures outside. He's also an ultrarunner and special education teacher living in Natick, Massachusetts. He studied English Literature at UMass Amherst and has a master's in education. He coaches track and field and cross country for middle schoolers and co-founded the Natick Runners, his local running club. He loves to travel and spends his time with family and friends in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Rockies of Colorado, and the desert trails of Arizona. You'll often find him at the top of a mountain trail with a burrito in hand and a trucker hat on his head.
