Tonight's Poet Corner: Daily Material

New Daily Material
by Belinda Roddie

The scraggly, balding man
wearing the enormous green backpack
sticks his hand into the nearby bushes
and produces a bike pump from
the leaves. He strolls off with either
a new treasure or a protected, prized
possession. At the closest gas station,

two blokes in black, splattered with
the oily guts of their truck, scream
obscenities at one another for not
being proper mechanics. Into my
own car, the inky gold is digested.

I have two books about princes
and wanderers riding in the passenger's
seat. Both prince and wanderer
die, but one of them gets to return
to his home planet and stay with his rose.

When I get home, the keyboard is still
hot from my raging fingers. The pen
can still lash its tongue out against
the paper. Sometimes, all it takes
is for me to step outside and carry on
with my schedule and peer into the neon
kaleidoscope and see patterns and colors
in ways I never thought were possible,
nor worth a single word on white.