A Trilogy of Small Thoughts

“sisyphean tennis balls”

At work, sometimes I am tasked with picking up all the stray tennis balls around the courts with a little metal basket. Each time I pick one up, at least two more materialize, having been sliced or spiked past the reach of an onrushing participant. With no time to think, I rotely perform my duties the way one would make coffee at six in the morning, promptly, routinely, but with little ceremony or attention. moving around with sleep-swollen eyes and a mind only half-teathered to the present moment. And, after picking up these tennis balls for long enough, they start to resemble small, spherical stones more than they do balls, and I begin to wonder whether they are life’s way of bracing me for the boulders to be pushed up the hills of the future.

“after hours”

All of these thoughts swim in my head after dark. 

In the stillness of night is when I write my truest, 

feel my deepest, 

exist the fullest. 

As I pause my work, 

with a burning eagerness to tell someone 

of my nightly revelations, 

I find the house quiet;

everyone is asleep. 

I am forced to keep my thoughts to myself until morning, 

by which time the fervor of the night will have worn off, 

yielding to the milky purity of the nascent morning.

“A lesson in notetaking”

Before I went to sleep last night, as I was lying in bed pondering the day’s events, I was suddenly struck with a brilliant idea for a poem about something or other. However, too comfortable to roll over and break out my notebook to write my idea down on, I resolved to tell myself to remember this idea when I woke up the following morning. When morning did arrive, I was struck with this overwhelming feeling of excitement, as I had had a brilliant idea the night before. I just couldn’t remember what the idea itself was.