A Golden Shovel After Omar Musa’s Leopard Made of Midnight Clouds

Today i feel so tired,
though the thing(s) i’m tired of
elude(s) me. Perhaps i’m tired of the
(non)selective reporting on the news
or maybe i’m tired of not being (re)tired

or maybe i’m tired of the incessant sounds of
traffic streaming past my place and along the

highway. Is it that superhighway—the net—
that i’m tired
of?
Is it my climate/Covid/comorbid anxiety
that i’m tired
of?
i cannot help but harbour regret

over having spent so
much time flying solo. i
keep thinking of that time i fell

in a hole & rolled my ankle. i strive to be asleep
right throughout the night and
struggle to recall all i’ve dreamed.

i feel good when i read books, view art or listen to i
Tunes or similar. i wonder: if i was
in fact a track about a
big cat, would i be RR’s ‘Fast as a Leopard’,
YYY’s ‘Gold Lion’ or RHCP’s ‘Slow Cheetah’? i once made

A Golden Shovel After Omar Musa’s Leopard Made of Midnight Clouds

the major mistake of
trying to learn trumpet: i stayed up till midnight
each night trying but, unlike Flea, failed. Mist still clouds

my views of vistas and
keeps me in my place—this space where the
semi-darkness somehow shines bright.

Whenever i peer through gumtrees at the Moon,
i wonder how & why that satellite has shone
on us for so long, how & why it shines through
Earth’s atmosphere and into the heart of me.