I planted seeds today to make up for yesterday’s excess

I planted seeds today to make up for yesterday’s excess, and just

as I’m about to write this poem Desmond wants to show me a Minecraft

parody of Peppa Pig. Then I discover a line of ants. Envy and mistrust

at work impede my sanity. My team is both under and over-staffed,

and I am overwhelmed, intermittently trying to hard and not trying

enough. The ants have discovered a piece of cheese. I do care what 

my coworkers think, and I need a salary, there’s no denying it. The higher

the better. I don’t know the names of the yellow flowers and glare

at my boss without meaning to. I’m just trying to survive the astrology

of the week, month, year. What are you implying? That survival 

isn’t a goal–but that’s what every holiday is about, every cosmology

is the story of someone or some group eking it out by not dying

year after year and then leaving some kind of archival evidence

that proves their existence. I’m having trouble not feeling bitter 

this afternoon, the senseless emphasis of annual performance reviews

and self-evaluation. What is any good? I pick up the random litter

from our yard and wonder who thinks it’s ok to throw their McDonald’s

wrapper on my rosemary. I mean what does it mean to be good at

something? I am ok at gardening. My approach is to keep doing it

and slowly improve. I tried to write romance novels once, was not

good at it. I am a good enough parent, but I don’t know what kind of bird

is calling outside the kitchen window and I want to be admired for being

myself, which is ridiculous and not ridiculous. I have tried being myself

at work and also hiding as much of myself as possible. Neither is effective.

The blurred non-divide between life and work and the freeing realization

that everything is everything. I used to live in a house with several mantelshelves

and so several fireplaces, all decorated with pictures, mostly. Damnation

is a kind of distinction, I think, drinking my coffee as coffee-in-itself,

or imagining I do. Coco leans into me, sees her name and says, ‘What

are you writing?” And I say, “If you’re going to be all up in my business

you’ll definitely be in the poem.” She touches my earrings, my cheek,

makes baby babble. Desmond yells about not having screentime,

then informs me that I’m distracting myself from writing, then tells

me my hair looks crazy, then laughs and says, “Birds are so funny,

they flock. Flocking birds!” At this point I’m wondering about the parallels

between writing a poem and trying to leave the house on a crummy

Tuesday morning. “Flocking birds these days,” says Desmond, then runs 

into the living room while I grouse about feeling hot and try to have a thought.

Google Gemini says I should say, “I am trying to learn how to be in the world

without being of it,” but that’s not true. We’re all of this world while being 

in it. I’m not on it, though, not this morning, awaiting my annual performance

review, explaining that a lowercase d and an uppercase do go in opposite 

directions, wondering how to quantify the way I’ve spent most of my time

for the approximate past twelve months, wondering what the requirements

exceeding expectations are. “Pretend I’m a grumpy monkey,” Desmond says,

and that’s what I am, a grumpy, slightly panicked creature who can’t shake it off, 

who gets excited when the back brick steps get power washed, tells the children 

to come see, thinks about the relationship between power washing and heartache.