Ed Robson is a retired psychologist, new MFA, heart attack survivor, and poetry slam champion who lives in Winston-Salem, NC and winters when he can in Guatemala. He writes poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, restores neglected houses with his wife, and loves cooking for his friends. His poems have appeared in Prune Juice, Fleas on the Dog, Right Hand Pointing, Heart, and other journals.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

THE VIEW FROM THE TREADMILL

The view from the treadmill
is mostly of the empty parking lot.
I have the morning to myself
as I warm up and get into my rhythm.
The office manager arrives
just as I reach the one-point-five mile point.
Half done, time to push the pace
up from a brisk walk to an easy run.
Other early risers come,
the order seldom varying.
Mostly I just watch
the flashing numbers on the read-out,
the graphic of my progress circling the virtual track.
Bump the speed a tenth after each lap
until it’s time to slow down, cool down,
shower, dress, and punch the clock.

I tell myself I’m rolling back
my personal odometer,
remembering the days, some 15 years ago,
when I would do this at the local Y.
Four miles took me thirty minutes then;
now it’s three in forty
after four weeks starting every day this way.
I try to keep my eyes high,
not get stuck there in the numbers.
The day’s a pretty one outside,
but I’m glad to be where I am.
I’m pleased to hear my breath
not straining, even near the end,
and wonder if tomorrow I might
run a little further.
It’s not about the numbers,
not exactly just about the numbers, anyway,
although two hundred thirty-two now stands
where I seem to recall one ninety-five,
but even those aren’t what I’m really watching,
what I’m doing here.

I come each morning to this little room
provided for the clinic staff,
appropriately situated right next to the exit.
I’m looking for an exit from the other treadmill,
that keeps me far too well stocked with excuses
for neglecting all the rest of what
once made my life so rich,
too tired to get my shop tools out,
too busy for a weekend in the woods,
too harried to relax and jam with AJ and his friends,
too important to take off an afternoon
to share some pretty place with Shashi,
but most of all too weak
to challenge all of those excuses.

I run because I want to know
I love myself enough to keep my promises to me,
enough to gather up my scattered shreds of honesty,
and once again inhabit all the beauty I can see,
paradoxically,
better from the treadmill.

BODY OF WORK

The rail around my front stoop needs a coat of paint.
I should have slapped that on when it was new, last summer.
I was busy, though, and so it waited, and it weathered,
so now it needs a lot more sanding than would have been required before,
tedious work, much of it awkward, tiring less from actual exertion
than the strain of finding, holding the position, slowly moving
the small power tool along each rail and strut until the wood
emerges, smooth and ready for the primer.

My younger self begrudged such profligate expenditure of time
on boring tasks that promise little satisfaction,
and the man of recent years, though patient with his careful crafts—
artistic, literary, intellectual—set greater stock in works
that would endure. Until the night
when nameless aches prevented sleep
and chest pains interrupted plans
and two nights in a hospital reminded me
that the refined life of the mind
depends on matters coarsely corporal
and often boring, time-consuming, hardly difficult
except the making of the time for them.

I have always loved to make things: stories lately, poems,
plays and essays such as wordsmiths do, but I will gladly craft with wood
or stone and silver when words reach their limits.
Making time’s a different kind of challenge,
and it takes another kind of prep, like that that must be done
before you lay the paint on, to smooth away the part of me
that bristles at the need to take an hour to walk around the park,
and doesn’t want to go to bed in case the words should start to flow,
but, patience, making time by taking time, in hope those slow steps
will become a longer walk. So now the opportunity
to honor the slow tedium of sanding—first the stoop rail,
then the larger one around the deck—becomes the exercise
of living thankfully the gift of time.