Slow

(Introductory note:  This is the first of seven poems I wrote recently, and hope to post here over the next few weeks.  Though they are seven separate poems, they go together, and I guess as a unit I'll call them something like "How I Want to Live."  I don't claim to write great poetry.  These poems are uneven and presented published here without edit...for whatever they may be worth to whomever may read....)

Slow

On a bright day in May I came back to the city,
back to the concrete and steel from which I was bred.
How long had I been away in lake and forest,
in silence and mostly solitude?
Not that long really, but long enough....
Long enough to be jarred
into realizing for the first time
that the beat of my heart,
the rhythm of my my life,
the cadence of of my mind,
was frantic.

And so was everyone and everything I knew.

I was quiet the next day.
I called in sick to work.
I didn't shower that morning.
I walked the city streets all day.
A cold breeze rose in the afternoon and
I was chilled in my shirtsleeves but I walked on.
There was motion, endless motion everywhere.
And to what end?  I did not know.

They think I am a weirdo now, I know they do.
I walk.  I bike.  I wash my dishes by hand every day.
And I don't really get much of anywhere.
But seems like getting all the places I used to think
I needed to go...lost importance somehow.

What matters is that I know, as I take each
steady and strangely lightened step,
that the cadence inside me
(Thoreau's "different drum"?)
if the rhythm of peace.