Stealing - Oct. 03, 2023

Would you slip a neighbor’s trowel

In your jacket pocket left for a

month by a shared bush?

Would I pick up a twenty-dollar bill

fallen from a car driven

by someone I don’t know?

Do poets pinch a great line

and use it knowing its author

will probably never see it to claim it?

I guess a “red hand” is one

embarrassed for being caught

the sudden color of a thief

that guilt circulating

in the lyric shuffling it’s feet

looking awkward pulled out

of a lineup and hauled away

the public never to gasp

at the hole in the poem

now doing time

in a solitary drawer