Pearls

Originally posted 6/16/2013.

Upon waking I am an engine
for cobbling together random things
and hoping they are true.

My first thought is of
a landscape
with a football stadium.

My second is of
a scrap of paper bearing these words:
“your prime is seven.”
 
There may be,
suddenly somewhere,
an esoteric cabal

of crushingly huge men
chanting prime numbers.  
I hope so. 

So much depends
on it being true
after I write it.

My next thought
is that I ought
to sit up in bed and see how I feel.

My first action
is to sit up in bed 
and see how I feel.  

I’m still afraid of social media,
angry without cause,
desperately in love.  

It is morning,
I am the new carrier
of the disjointed day, and

my first action upon others
will be to write something.  
It will be angry or loving or based in fear — correction: 

it will be angry 
and loving 
and based in fear,

but it won’t be large. It will not assume
the form of a linebacker.
I’ll be gentle.

Count to seven,
push aside the covers.
The world needs me

and people like me
who are the sand grains
outside the oyster.

We are many, we have
pearl potential.
Some become random irritants

but most likely
we’ll become the bed upon which
beauty happens, mostly in spite of us,

even as the offense
thunders forward, bearing
the irreducible math of living.