NOW YOU DON�T SEE IT, NOW YOU STILL DON'T

Most of what we sweat are not the little things, but the absence of things, the feared thing that usually never happens but for which we pay heavily in energy and time expended.

 

It always perplexes me

how a thing of little consequence

can cause major disruptions

in the lackluster lives of people

who cannot accept that nothing

should ever jolt us to the point

we fill our heads nonsensically

with the weightlessly absent.

 

Does it make sense to worry

about nothing? To subject one’s nerves

to solving the clueless?

Nothing should drive us to that!

And yet nothing does for some.

They look for what’s not there:

The flaw in the perfect painting.

The scratch on a brand new car.

 

Nothing is worth the aggravation,

according to us and them.

We say, “Let it go; it’s nothing.”

They insist, “There is nothing

to worry about, so we worry.”

How can we make it any clearer?

Add up all these empty problems,

all these nothings and you get nothing

 

but a wasted life, moments

dissipated, body and soul worn

to the bone and spirit.

It doesn’t pay to repeat again and again

that’s nothing. Don’t fret. It’s nothing.

These fools who delight in mysteries

will delve into that nothingness

searching for somethingness

 

to hold onto, to heal, to solve.

At the same time they waste breath

and brain cells turning nothing over

in their hands and minds:

that invisible nonentity,

that mind-boggling thing not there,

the imagined presence of the absent.

That nothing to shake a stick at.