Random Thoughts
Do random thoughts and
scattered conversation
deserve to be a poem?
I think a lot of things
like that as I drive
from work to home.
All day I've tried,
and struggled to
make sense of all
I heard in a futile
attempt to celebrate
the opening signs of Spring.
I sense old Lao Tzu
giggling at my naïve zeal
to impose a form
on random thoughts and
scattered conversations that
don't deserve to be a poem.
I bought flowers for the
secretary the first thing
at work this morn and yet,
I have to think if
the day would be
much different if
I'd marked it not at all.
Good Confucians, we name
the seasons,
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.
We note each one's passing
and that may
be our fatal flaw.
We want to feel we have control
of all that we survey.
From Stonehenge to the present
we crave to know the way
the planets continue on
their course, no matter
what we say.
But, if somehow we have a name
we fill ourselves with pride,
so Spring today will appear
at precisely eleven fifty-five.
With that nailed down for this year,
and of course we know the next,
we appear to give good order
to all the random thoughts and
scattered conversations that
fall in the spaces between.
Without these benchmarks
we'd surely live in
Lao Tzu's
formless reality.
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