Halfway through shaving, it came–
the word for a poem.
I should have scribbled it
on the mirror with a soapy finger,
or shouted it to my wife in the kitchen,
or muttered it to myself till it ran
in my head like a tune.
But now it’s gone with the whiskers
down the drain. Gone forever,
like the girls I never kissed,
and the places I never visited–
the lost lives I never lived.
- Barriss Mills