Over the Load Limit

"Over the Load Limit"

Problems unspoken, and now we are over the load limit,
hauling cargo unfit for our carriers. We think it
brave to cross the ice-bound pass, skates and brakes,
hairpins and grades more frightening than a semester’s
trigonometry score.

We drag our backpack, overladen with hardbacks,
down linoleum halls lined with lockers never combined,
the numbers lost or stolen. From the second we step
to the moment we leap, we carry until our spines are
curved, carved by our overstuffed hampered.

We drag, we convey, we cargo, we convoy
but never lay our burdens down upon the side of the road.

We carry, one shoulder then the left; we heave, we assume,
we human, we chatroom, we loosen the straps at the advice
of an upperclassman with better precise. But we never
lay our backpack down in green pastures,
beside still waters

Until someone makes us.

And don’t we feel 40 pounds lighter,
don’t we laugh closely where the straps once chafed,
don’t we love crazier than the books we carried,
don’t we hug louder than the diesel’s attempts at
defined impossible.

There is no mountain we cannot climb
when we lay the burdens down aforetime.