Shifting Reality – A Poem

SHIFTING REALITY

They collide, a bear and a dogbone,

To become a giant mouse head.

I surrender to shifting reality.

◊  ◊  ◊

An angel’s cowlick elongates, circles to her chin

And forms an elephant’s trunk,

Lifting water to mouth.

◊  ◊  ◊

Continents morph as maps float by,

Mountains to peninsulas to islands;

Plate tectonics on amphetamines.

◊  ◊  ◊

A laughing alligator with a camel’s hump

Gallops towards the horizon, and . . .

Blue! All is blue!

◊  ◊  ◊

Airy wisps of white cotton candy coalesce

Shaping a tropical storm swirl,

And the shifting begins again.

◊  ◊  ◊

Shifting Reality

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What To Do On Your Day Off

OK, so maybe you don’t want to hear what a busy weekend I had, and how I just had to rest on Monday so I could fully engage with the other six days of the week that I don’t work. I know it’s obnoxious to say, but five years into my “sabbatical” from the work-a-day life, I still like Mondays best because everyone else is headed back to work.

Mean spirited? Maybe.

But hey, I worked full-time for thirty-four years, and I’ll have to work again unless I become a famous author. I took off yesterday. I was tired. Get over it.

Recommendations for Leisure Time Well Spent:

• Go to the gym. It lifts your spirits, plus you feel virtuous even if you don’t do bupkis for the rest of the day. But don’t get weighed and measured because you might find out that you have gained three pounds in a month and put on several inches in the process. Also, your body mass index might resemble that of a slab of cheddar cheese. But you can always explain to the coach that your brother died and you are grieving and so you’ve been eating too much. Friends have been taking you out to eat a lot, and you need to have two pieces of cinnamon toast with butter every night because that’s what your mother always gave you when you were sad.
• Take a long bubble bath with an excellent new book. Mine is a collection of writings called Spirituality, Contemplation, and Transformation. But don’t stay in the tub for an hour and forty-five minutes or you might almost miss the grocery store. Then you wouldn’t be able to buy a bunch of healthy organic kale, zucchini, and apples and then come home and eat left-over pizza for dinner.
• Write, write, and write. In your journal, for your blog, and for an upcoming anthology that you hope will facilitate your authorial fame. Write all day instead of paying your overdue bills or your deceased brother’s overdue bills. Don’t put off paying his bills till evening, though, or you might decide that would be too depressing right before bed and instead go back to reading your book. Which would mean you would have to make a snack, like say, cinnamon toast with butter.
• Make lists! Get organized! Make lists of daily tasks, weekly tasks, and monthly goals. Put them on a nifty dry erase board using different color markers. Devote plenty of time to deciding which color is appropriate for each task. Your new iPhone has lots of fun ways to waste time get organized, too. If you spend enough time making lists, you can achieve a sense of accomplishment without — well, you get my point.
• Don’t, under any circumstances, get on Facebook. And if you accidentally do so, don’t spend hours in virtual conversations about Bob Dylan’s Superbowl-advertising-sell-out to the auto industry, people’s use of plastic versus reusable bags, or the history of using one or two spaces after a period. With my friends, this can take the better part of an afternoon. Still, you might decide it’s worth the time when you come across a friend’s post saying that she just discovered her little boy doing his first Google search: “How to bild a growing up mashine.” This made my day.

Artwork: Winslow Homer, Girl in the Hammock. Wikimedia Commons.