I wrote this poem on January 19, 2013, apparently after reading a number of Wendy Videlock poems.

And I remember very little else, only knowing this because I made a note in the poem itself.

In 2013 I was finishing my MFA in creative writing and took a good two hours every morning to write, often completing two, three, or four poems a day when I did not have other things to do for my courses.

I was on sabbatical from my job teaching middle school science and it felt like I had all the time in the world.

I tucked into my basement office around 8 am each day with our dog Fairlee, who was then just a pup, sitting on an upholstered chair behind me, a chair that my wife’s grandmother gave us back in 1993 and which still sits there in my office.

I don’t write from that spot anymore, and my days no longer feel like I have all the time in the world.

Fairlee still loves to sit there whenever I go into the basement. My office is now cluttered with things I’ve collected, a lot of it books and art supplies that I moved out of my mom’s apartment when she moved into the retirement community she is at now.

I cannot explain why I seem to have so little time. Commitments is the short explanation.

Commitments to people, to organizations, to my health, to our family, to our dogs, to our house and yard, to the many projects that I seem to pick up like I would five dollar bills left on the floor.

With the feeling like I had won something.

What I’ve won is being somewhat overwhelmed with what I want to do in my writing world and what I am committed to doing in my other world.

I’m not complaining though. It’s a problem I am incredibly fortunate to have and one that I would not trade for much that I can think of.

As for this poem, it feels like it really means something.

I had to look up Wendy Videlock and read some of her poems, but none of them really sounded like this one. I’m not sure what the inspiration was.

I had no idea what the word “dunnish” was, so I looked it up. Turns out it isn’t a word, or is a word the way adding “-ish” to any word makes it an adjective.

It even got autocorrected here as I wrote to “donnish” which I also don’t know.

But, looking up the word “dun“, finding the word means a color, a horse of that color, or “an urgent request” usually for money, well, I’m still not sure what the word means here.

I’m in a unique position here. Normally a reader makes a decision to trust an author/poet that the word has a meaning in this situation, one carefully chosen and that if we spend the time we will eventually get it.

But I’m the writer reading his own poem and I don’t trust myself.

I offered the poem to WordPress’s AI image generator and got quite a few amusing images, mostly a menacing man with geese behind him either holding a clothes iron or what looks to be a gun.

If the poem is so good that an AI can’t decipher it, well, good for me.

Here’s a couple of those images. I sure hope the poem has more in it than is suggested with these pictures.

Yikes.