Hope

lottery-winner-1427640-639x423(In response to this week’s Living Poetry Prompt.)

I play the lottery
for those hours or days
between buying the ticket
and learning the results.
Before the ping pong balls
are set a spinning
I am a potential winner,
deciding how to spend
or invest, pay off a car
or the mortgage,
vacation in Monte Carlo
or Macau.

Like an early romance,
anticipating each date,
each kiss, imagining
what glorious wonders
lie ahead. That hope
carries on like inertia
through the wedding
until the fated
numbers are drawn,
my flaws revealed
and Schrödinger’s cat
gets divorced.

Yet I keep playing
every week.

About Bartholomew Barker

Bartholomew Barker is one of the organizers of Living Poetry, a collection of poets and poetry lovers in the Triangle region of North Carolina. His first poetry collection, Wednesday Night Regular, written in and about strip clubs, was published in 2013. His second, Milkshakes and Chilidogs, a chapbook of food inspired poetry was served in 2017. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. Born and raised in Ohio, studied in Chicago, he worked in Connecticut for nearly twenty years before moving to Hillsborough where he makes money as a computer programmer to fund his poetry habit.
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2 Responses to Hope

  1. JeanMarie says:

    The cat! No!

    Like

  2. The cat, both yes and no!

    Like

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