I Carry with Me...
That was the prompt on Tuesday and this is what I wrote in 25 minutes.
I carry with me
skin and bones, muscles and a phone.
Am I a hybrid man? Only part organic?
Wired to a plan?
A monthly subscription,
to an eternal addiction,
a reflection in a self-made fiction
of all that surrounds me?
One small fish in a vast and endless sea,
just an atom, no Eve, no snake, no tree.
And all that I can ever be
rests within what I carry
on this short but epic journey.
Stories told in scar tissue,
stitch-marked and stapled
page after page.
Who wrote the Book of Life?
A song from long ago.
The lyric still lingers.
“I wonder wonder who. (ba dum dum dum)
Who wrote the book of love?”
Life is not a straight line.
Who said it was?
A statistical scientist who once wrote a book,
so boring to read, I never took a look.
Charts and lines, and graphs, and numbers,
I rather rest in eternal slumber.
Asleep at the wheel. That’s how I feel.
I put my faith in God, a much better pilot.
He flies the plane while I remain silent,
and just check in whenever it matters
to get a reading on the endless chatter,
of never-ending opinions that change, like the weather,
but always begin why I should worry.
I want better news, so I ask Alexa
to tell me the good news for the day.
“I’m not sure how to help you,” I hear her say.
But if I ask in the bedroom to a different Alexa,
a man’s voice comes on and immediately reflects
a stream of fresh stories that he collects
about all of the good things that fill today’s basket.
Otherwise, I study to see what I can learn,
another way to change the day into something I earn.
Small rewards for learning new tricks,
I change the course and hope it sticks.
Try learning a language when you hit eighty
Mandarin Chinese the ultimate weight.
Some say it’s the hardest language in the world.
But I find it to be a beautiful pearl.
the structure so clean and to the point.
It makes me wish I could live to be a thousand
to learn all the words and the odd constructions
of a pictographic lingo that’s harder than Russian.
It keeps my mind limber, or so I think.
Like doing the dishes left in the sink.
Clean up, shape up, do your best,
to get at least seven or eight hours of rest.
Then wake up, shake up, and manifest.
Something fun. Pass the test
to bend every line
at each fork in the quest.