Running in the cold and wet. It lacks appeal!
After reeling off 3 poems with titles based on anagrams of "James Andrew McComb", I sent them to him and he replied with one based on my own name: "Warren Miles Mars" (see at foot).
The obvious next step was to write a few based on my own name myself, and this I did. There were at least 25,000 anagrams of my name however and it took quite a while to churn through them and extract the most promising.
The final line of this poem called out to me as I gazed the title and it was easy to write from there.
The sky was dark and cloudy on the morning of the race,
"It's only rain. You mustn't mind!" they told me to my face.
A mile over cobbles bare, of basalt, slick and cold,
And treacherous, for those of us with treadless rubber soled.
We lined up as the thunder roared and barely heard the gun,
But off we raced in bitter cold to do what could be done.
The rain poured down in torrents and then quickly turned to sleet,
As we froze in shorts and t-shirts in the dark forbidding street.
The toughest were for going on, the sanest meant to stop,
When we saw the warming doorway of the central coffee shop.
And there we stayed and sheltered from the fury of the storm:
The warm milers saner and the saner milers warm.
Warren Mars - May 2012
Here is the poem James McComb wrote around an anagram of my name. I enjoyed it very much and I reproduce it here with his permission.
Lasers Warm Miner
Cold, dark and dank
Down in the mine
At the bottom of the ladder
In a broken pile
I remember falling
An age ago
There must have been some rotten rung
I went right through
It is cold here
In my broken pile
But I have my lasers
To keep me warm
No harm to me can come as long
As I have my lasers
James McComb - May 2012