I had a bunch of things to do today. What I did instead was read poetry.
The poem I liked best was Jamaal May’s “Hum for the Bolt,” which takes us to a World of Warcraft landscape to consider the “bolt,” a blunt, potent word, in a setting where it might be a weapon, a spell, a quantity of silk.
But the narrator decides he would rather be the kind of bolt that can
…eat the dark,
draw shadows in quick strokes across wall
and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.