My wallet has two dollars.
My pocket has eighty-seven cents.
Not quite enough to run away from home forever.
But enough to run away for the day.
My bicycle navigates trails and back streets
thirty miles to a lake park with herons at the shoreline.
A photographer documents wildlife’s adjustments
to encroaching urbanization.
I ask the burger clerk if she enjoys
being the poorly paid instrument of unrestrained capitalism?
She stares blankly to a spot three feet behind my head.
Do you want fries with that?
An hour after watching folks picnic at the park,
I head home with three hours before supper
to work out a believable story of my day,
knowing suppertime conversation requires it.
copyright © 2020 Kenneth P. Gurney
postscript
By the time I was ten years old, I started to adventure on my bicycle riding farther and farther from home each school-less day. A favorite place to go was the Morton Arboretum five miles from our home. When I was that age, the outskirts of my hometown still had cornfields and farm silos attached to barns. Over the next seven years, Chicago expanded outward over the farms. I kept riding farther and farther west to reach visible farms, woods, and lakes.
Umflop 