Time and the Purloined Pen 

“..we had bags of time to catch the ferry..”—

Billy Collins

Lounging like an aristocrat in his blue

bathrobe, he informs himself ‘we have more

than enough bags of time to weed 

the backyard garden’ so instead of rising

to the task at hand buried at bottom of these 

supposedly copious bags of time he picks up the pen pilfered from the Kilkenny hotel, 

the place in the heart of the small cobblestoned city with the most sumptuous breakfast he’d ever feasted on, long tables laden with sticky pastries, sausages, melon, salted ham, fresh orange juice, dark coffee kissed by dollops of whipping cream and eggs of every ilk, yes as that pen began to slide like Irish butter over the blank page 

and into an unkempt garden of sprawling weeds and tangled wildflowers in the next Irish town, cozy and chilly, wet with mist and a big enough bag of time to begin another poem.