What Matters

We wake into a cupboard of mirrors,
every shelf crowded with choices dressed as hunger:
coffee or silence,
toast or the slow ache of skipping it,
emails like wasps rattling the windowpane,
each subject line a bright false sun.

We pick, we click, we stir, we swallow,
our days simmering like pots left too long on the back burner,
we tell ourselves the steam is purpose.

At home, the laundry becomes a battlefield of cotton and ghosts,
socks orphaned like quiet apologies under the bed.
We debate the angle of folded towels
as if creases could hold the sky together,
scrub counters until they gleam like rehearsed smiles.

Love waits, barefoot in the hallway,
while we polish the trivial into sacred ritual,
dusting meaning from the surface of things that never had it.

In offices, decisions march in suits,
binary as teeth: yes/no, profit/loss,
numbers dripping like oil through spreadsheets,
thick, black, convincing.
We crown meetings with syllables that taste like cardboard,
mistaking volume for gravity,
strategy decks for maps of destiny.

Ambition beats its drum inside our ribs,
and we confuse its echo for truth.

Beyond us, the loud theater of nations—
flags snapping like jaws in the wind,
voices distilled into slogans sharp enough to cut bread.
We argue about borders drawn like pencil lines on water,
call it order, call it survival, call it history,
while the quiet facts of living slip through our fingers:
breath in, breath out, the shared air no one owns.

And after the noise, after the sorting and stacking and shouting,
after the thousand glittering decoys we chase
like fish mistaking hooks for stars,
what remains is a choice so small it barely makes a sound:
to be kind,
or not.