These are the days where it feels like herding cats would be easy;
like all you have is a group of wildebeests and a narrow path through a china shop and they expect you to smile as you drive the throng into the greased up isle with nothing but a bullhorn and a shoehorn. It tests your mettle and blunts the blades of the knives and swords and Swiss Army implements you never thought you’d need to grow and never though you’d have, but somehow it never seems like you have enough. It ends up being that the most powerful doomsday bomb in your arsenal is just to get through the day, knowing that the self-prescribed reward is on the other side of it all. They say it’s bad for you, like they do to all the things in the world that make the world worth livin’ for, and deep down you agree; but it’s either that or another vice that lines up to take the edge off of the naivety that you signed up for this willingly. You slithered down the isle with all that mattered pushing you forward, making promises of the white picket fence and the whitewall radial swing hanging from a chunk of proud oak, or maybe it was birch, you don’t quite recall after two years of diapers and five years of sleeping lighter than your wallet. And when you do stand at the bar with the fellows you recognize as other soldiers in this war, you joke about all those dreams with them and inevitably there will be one that gazes down at you through that thousand-yard-stare and manages a pity laugh before asking in that knowing, rhetorical way: “Why didn’t you choose Poplar?” like anything else you’ve built out of those dreams is just waiting for the final lighting bolt to put it out of its misery. And as you trudge away from that damning bit of friendly assistance to head to ballet practice or soccer or was it baseball this week, the missus lets you know she’s sick and it could be the kind that leads to babies and for a moment you have faith stronger than the pope simply because you know the devil isn’t that cruel and God’s sense of humour is par for that kind of joke. And maybe there’s a few moments you pass out and gather your wits long enough to hit REM for a cycle or two, but they wake you up with demands for a bedtime story and you wonder if you had a chance if you’d sock Doctor Seuss right in the mouth or embrace him in a hug because at least the little buggers listen to his rhymes. Two fish, blue fish later, though, and they give you your dose for the day; that damning drug that puts cocaine to shame and: “Thanks, Dad.”
Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad, and herding cats seems like a lot of extra work in comparison.
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Studio Shinnyo 2015. Khattam-Shud, EOF.
Posted under Poetry
