My Shrunken World - July 16, 2025

I write poetry and watch television

from our fading green sofa

take walks around the creek

swim and sun in my backyard

drive 8.6 miles to my poetry class,

do medication runs and dinners out

truth is, I subsist in a ten-mile

radius around my desert home

luckily, poems constantly arrive

at my mind’s hyperspace portal

while others trickle out of the heart

still, I’m starting to feel the shrinking

boundaries of an over-surveyed life

and want to follow an impulse to do

something really foolish or really fun

and really far away