Astonishment

Perhaps astonishment is a fly arising from an act of my mind with little direct correspondence to what I really feel.

Maybe astonishment is the strange feeling of being referred to as a pronoun while in the presence of someone else.


Or perhaps astonishment is the green plastic stick that slips into the sipping hole of the lid to keep the hot coffee in while being transported on a bumpy road

Or maybe astonishment is my son’s pronouncement: “Why would I want to see a problem I can’t do anything about?”

My Disquiet

Perhaps my disquiet is a drumming rain which speaks to me of a trick of the nature of truth that in order to survive we must rise from the table where that child’s game of the troubled self is being played and turn our attention away from the shadow that slides across the white wall of the beautiful light we see by for no reason other than to ensure its own survival.

Or maybe my disquiet is to be found in images of fingernails bitten raw, a late night stomach’s unfurling struggle, the terrifying tic of the wind-up alarm clock voicing the darkened room into a narrow plank poised over the final moments of a blindfolded descent into a watery contempt for my own inspiration’s incommensurable value.