regrets
And it's 6 am and I haven't gone to bed yet
the commitments pile up around me,
like the snow piled outside the door
"the blizzard of 96"
never seems to stop, but they can close the airports
when I can't shut off my mind.
Is it too much too hard too fast,
the way my mind screams and the winter wind whips,
the way the problems tug and stretch and pull
how nothing ever seems to get done and suddenly
it's 6 am and I haven't gone to bed.
I walk the fine pencil-tightrope-line
between overwork and overpity,
tending to the thought that I worked so hard,
so hard,
just to get where I've gotten and now I deserve the time
to take care of myself, to sit here
at midnight 3 am 6 am
and sip at my tea and read my novel and snuggle my teddy bear
and let the snow pile into drifts more massive than any I've seen
and not touch it, think about it, even glance at the shovel
I know I should be wielding.
Perhaps it's not too much, as I tell myself,
I could give more than I do, I could do better than I am,
my visions of my own collapse if denied my evening tea
are melodramatic, or simply wrong
and who am I to grant myself freedom from commitment?
No wrinkled man ever lay on his deathbed,
wheezing and gasping for one last desperate breath of life,
and wished with his final earthly thought to have worked harder,
taken more burdens onto his shoulders,
pushed himself to and past that limit of how much one person can accomplish.
The regrets are always for the tea left unsipped,
the books left unread,
the friendships left unloved. And too will I remember
if all I choose is thought and snow shovels?
Or must I give myself over to commitment now to reap
the riches of leisure later in life?
I hate the thought that I neglect my duty;
I look at the unshoveled walk and picture myself struggling to wade through it,
to walk in hip-deep ice and crying, screaming,
regretting.
And I dust off my mittens and place the carrot where his nose should go
and go inside for another cup of tea.