My Desk

My desk my desk my desk

Oh how it plagues my mind

I wish it was a place to write, to think, to create but alas

It is piled high with bills, paid and unpaid and question-marked.

I take a ton of paper

Received daily in the mailbox

And knowing not how to wrangle it

Dispose of it there.

There there there on my desk

My poor creaky IKEA desk

How it sags in its imperfect joints under the weight

Of all that needs doing.

Does it scream and yell and beg for attention like those short people I live with?

No,

It sits quietly

Waiting for me to notice.

It watches how I do the dishes

Sweep sweep sweep the floors

Obsessively pulling shit from cat boxes

Yet ignore its dusty and disheveled surface.

It watches while I do most anything

writing, drawing, designing up a storm

Planning meals and cooking them into black clouds

Staring at anything but the to do lists, the filing and the God knows what is really in those high rising piles.

It marvels at all the ways I use up energy to swirl in a hurricane of activity

And waits…waits….waits...for me

To notice something is stuck

Nothing is actually moving.

That all that flurry of goings on

Is plugged up in the drain hole

Unable to flow out and down and through to where it needs to go

Because the bottom is clogged with the hairy mess on my desk.

Finally finally FINALLY it hits

That the desk can also be-- must be part of the creative tempest

Has to be loved into organized files and concrete action plans

In order for any rainbows to land.