If The Fish Are Poetry

If I say the words,

they will leave me

so I will pick up a smooth pebble, and skim it lazily across the silence

of Autumn's opulent haze,

and the water will yelp like a child.

If I hear the water cry,

a silver shrill, like a toy copper bell

I will miss a sound, not the way

one misses a place, or it’s golden hue

but to miss the feeling of home deep within the rib cage.

If I think of home

the inkling perhaps will traipse slowly to my brain

where the wires conclude that things can still be so great

that they cannot be willed into the palm of a creased hand

like a great body of water left untouched by morning.

But, if I think of water you must stop me.

Because, water brings the hum of lavender fields

calling me across a brook, and I shall follow it to where it gives way to a river.

For if I am a river, the fish are poetry, you are in love,

and I have written it all wrong.