Socks and Shadows

I like the rumi poems

I’m the kind of person who

Looks for wriggling worms in the rain

I know it’s nature

I know that’s how the world goes round

But I can’t stop myself from stealing

A sparrows lunch

For just a little more life

I’m always late when it rains

Because I don’t pass them by

I see the ones swept up by storms

And I try

To miss it

To look anywhere else but here

And I see me

I see us

together

And sometimes I think

About how we almost never met

All the colors,

all the gases

The wind that

makes a sun set

I often press my feet to walls

Admiring the caked up paint

The bumps

I think of all the other people

Who might also have studied these cracks

I think of the people I know

The people I’ve been

And finally I start to notice my shadow

And my socks

And How they block

the light

How there’s a whole world

just beyond our sight

My hands are colorful

So they must hold some good

My hand has a shadow

So darkness too

What I were if I would

you consider a caterpillar’s ideas

If they were less blue

I like my socks

They remind me of the naps I took

I think even then I looked

For small secret things

In all my books

What does it say about me?

That I stop to help worms

Defiant and disrespectful to patterns she was, is

that the little bit that makes the shadow?

I was brushing my hair

I was brushing out the knots

And I thought

how I’d never treat a tangled plant

Or a worm without tenderness

For losing sight of their spots

Why doesn’t it connect

Why isn’t it the same

Is it because I’m in the shower

And not the rain?