Word Limit I Still Do Not Know

When I was what I thought was little

— although now you sit SATs at this age,

six or seven — I ran a field with my brother.

(Yes, now show me those left free to run a field.)

It was a morning, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Today, he said, he might not talk again,

as he’d already exhausted the allocation of words for a day.

i took him at his word

or at least played along like those streams

endless images, sensations unceasing, set loose to roam

to thrive, to live.

(Yes, now show me those left free to walk by a stream.)

But what comes out of that little (and I thought, equally matured)

mouth must fit within the count allowed.

Now, after many years of pulling a thread to where it was sewn,

I still do not know.

If even the edges of what we can write are the edges of what we can think,

if we might run out of words the way the lungs run out of breath, 
the pen out of ink…

Turns out some-one counted. The number is thinning. Sixteen thousand.

Perhaps he was right, this brother of mine,

Not that one boy could spend himself dry by lunchtime,

But that all of us are saying less, until a field that seemed immense

Becomes a well-measured garden of God-knows-by-whom-seeded poppies,

red going on red, like a piece of writing we would create unstructured, unaided.

That we all are writing more of just short, encrypted or not, texts

and one feels like a thief now with open hands running through long pieces

taking them out, lifting a thin red petal from a page and holding it up to the light.

That we all are the children who write clean, field-mown level, 
that’s what it is to see

And that’s what we believe at face value, or at least play along with God-knows-by-whom-seeded weed,

What is a child that would rather run than speak, but an adult who writes by word count

who never again ran through a field

but rather through a ground portion

that day by day

runs thin.