Confessions of the Slower Sprinter

Always my feet are a split second behind my heart,
almost winners. My chest is nearly
thick enough to reach the tape
and snap it louder than the gun.
Imagine me wearing the magic number,
running toward the award of a woman
who would change her name for me.

For the first time I see more than your back,
its number one stuck out like a finger,
or an old lecture, or a sign that says
stop do not pass. Now I hear
for the first time your soles sucking
behind me, taking deeper and slower
breaths through their rubber lips,
twisting your muscle into silence.

Then my lungs gather a second wind of pride;
the wind behind me spins you around.
My chest swells towards the tape
to measure itself in the volume of cheers
The first failure of your feet does not slow me down.
I run past smeared applause and the blindness of cameras,
towards rehearsed modesty and trophetic gleamings.
I run to make speeches with my head bowed
in your shadow, to praise you and take your cup, saying,
“He who is weighted with trophies
does not run as fast.”
I drink ice water from a trophy already engraved
with your name, a prize now full of my lips,
as I freeze the thought that, when you passed me,
you slipped on my sweat.




Robert S. King's poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. He has published three chapbooks (When Stars Fall Down as Snow, Garland Press 1976; Dream of the Electric Eel, Wolfsong Publications 1982; and The Traveller’s Tale, Whistle Press 1998). His full-length collections are The Hunted River and The Gravedigger’s Roots, both from Shared Roads Press, 2009; and One Man's Profit (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013). He recently stepped down as Director of FutureCycle Press in order to devote more time to his own writing.