(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 15, 2017)

Like a game of cutthroats
where it’s safe to not win and safe to not lose,
the pillow room of politics, peaceful and nonpartisan,
the middle is not invisible but the only slightly visible,
the waving stalks and straw of the masses, ghostly,
a place where you can pass, where everyone is passing
in order to stay in play.

Like the strong arc of a story
where the middle meanders but the end feels inevitable,
honorable, like a journey among knights, like the harvest,
the long farm days of history, respite before the ******:
the dogs are asleep, children in the fields of alfalfa
and then the trees rustle at the windbreak and you worry
maybe you’re not in the middle anymore.