Please

be seated, this poem is about to begin.
No run-of-the-mill greeting card rhyme

with lots of pop and pow. More subtle,
nuance lodged in metaphors, meaning

ripped from jagged words, obscure,
like graffiti on a brick wall, scribbled

in black ink, at night. Imagine
an outlaw poet on the run, wounded,

firing blank verse at a posse in pursuit,
missing, putting out the sun.

     (published by Otoliths)

Timothy Pilgrim, a native of Montana and retired university journalism professor living in Bellingham, Wash., is a Pacific Northwest poet and 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have been accepted more than 500 times by journals such as Toasted Cheese, Mad Swirl, Cirque, Santa Anna River Review, Windsor Review, Hobart, Otoliths and Prole Press in the U.S. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. He is the author of Mapping water and Seduced by metaphor: Timothy Pilgrim collected published poems, which the back cover calls “a 10 on any Richter imagination scale.”