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
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