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.