Exhale

I try to exhale Socrates But every time I breathe My Robert Frost disappears Into a ticklish ocean of air. You never take the same breath twice Every time I open my mouth The gulp of Lorca I was so proud of melts away And I won’t feel it in my lungs again. My fingers clutch the sky around me But my air is already gone Stolen by the wind, and someone else’s mouth. If only it were snowing. Then I could see the vapor of my poetry Form into thick, glacier smoke That I could hold on to.