kitchen table lullaby
there’s a pizza box tilted against
the anachronistic percolator
like a drunk leaning on a buddy
for help home in the single digits
a bottle of Orange Crush slowly
warming on the kitchen table
next to a too-early cutout of a
black cat on a pumpkin
the dog is snoring on a beanbag
the crickets or maybe tree frogs
are ratcheting up the noise out back
everyone is in bed except me
it used to be this way all the time
the house goes from loud to quiet
until I’m left to my own devices
clicking away at the keys
in recent years the house has been
quiet at all hours of the day or night
but I still find the late hours precious
like I’m the last one in the world awake
as if when I go to bed all the world
winks out of existence until
my eyes open in the morning
and the clocks begin ticking again
20 September 2013
State College, PA
Nice poem Jason. As for the world disappearing out of existence when you close your eyes… Buddhists would say that is in fact true! Everything in “existence” is based on “interdependent origination”. A person place or thing needs an observer to exist and that observer is dependent on the person place or thing to exist as “observer”… I think… I’m up late too while everyone is asleep…
Hi Jerry,
Yeah, as a Buddhist I was thinking about that in the last part of the poem. Although the kind of Buddhism I practice doesn’t include something as literal as the world actually not existing without my observing it.
Thanks for commenting!
Jason
Hi Jason, Just came across your reply to my comment–only took 9 months! Anyway, just sayin’ I realize how insane my comment may sound. It’s a real “noodle cooker”, something that needs to be kicked around in your head over and over again. The deeper it sinks in the more plausible it starts to sound and the debate as to it’s validity can start in ernest. For me, it seems to be plausible. The kind of Buddhism that I have been informed by breaks down like this. It really comes down to Karma, how our “life” is totally “caused” by what we once thought or have behaved. In essence we are now who we once thought we were. This creates a karma which forces us to perceive the world as we do in the present moment. We “ARE” our Karma. It is not “out there”… everything is coming “from” us not “at” us, as if we were projecting a movie onto a blank screen. I we change our consciousness now, here in the present, this will change how we perceive the world in the “future”. I hope this explains where my previous comment was coming from. I’m not a guru or sage that has the skills in explaining things simply. No way to know if what I’m saying is insane or on point… but it seems to work for me, which is all I can go by. 🙂