When I meet
someone, it always
seems that their
eyes run up
and down
the length of me,
taking
me
in.
Sometimes
they skim me
and sometimes it feels like
they’re pulling me apart
inside their head.
Do they want to find
those places where the words
make gentle curves on the tongue,
and the clever rhymes are wrung out
as chimes heard in the mind?
Or maybe it’s
the images
they want,
so they
linger like
a lazy wolf
over each
simile.
Or perhaps my shape catches
their eye as they roll it over me.
“Oh, I’m a metaphor man, myself.
But I do enjoy good piece of formatting.”
And always,
when they have come
to the end,
when they have marked
and rated
and scored me,
they turn the page
and do it all over again
with the next one of us
to come along.
Though maybe they’ll elbow a friend
“Check out the rhythm on that one!”
before they’re done with me
and they move on to younger words.
