“Early Bird Gets the Worm”
Poem by Elisa Matalon
I am a fish thrust onto desert sands
thrown into the quick,
told to breathe,
to undergo thousands of years of evolution, adaptation
trade my gills for lungs in span of time between
two shallow, vestiguous breaths,
Yet this life gives me no utopic ocean
for my misguided body to return.
No homeland I desperately long to rejoin.
Surely I will die if I spend this precious time
contemplating, conversing with
these undertakings bound to me.
For any meager shot at survival,
I have evolution to do.
I do my best not to glimpse past
the veil covering these relics,
these understandings I don’t want to see.
Always moving, always working.
Racing with every molecule of my being
against the time that constrains me
I try to rewrite my brain, reprogram all that I know.
Evolve, succeed.
I want acceptance
and crave satisfaction.
How else will I contain
the fear of future guilt enough to avoid its paralysis?
Introspection dissolves with action,
Self-improvement silencing thoughtful apathy.
The path is so devoid of nuance;
confident consonance salting the wound.
What can’t I understand?
“Life is a learning experience, but
shouldn’t you be done making these mistakes
by now? Didn’t you already
make this mistake?”
I must still be learning.
The growth mindset’s death sentence:
Anything is achievable with enough work, and
with this my sybilline laziness cements.
I have much to do, even and especially in strange times like these.
My room, continuing to be scattered,
to-do lists written on the backs of napkins and their ancestral, recycled ghosts-- efficiency has been ground into me like a second tongue.
It’s junior year, the best years of our life.
I’m tired and I’ve barely started living
I worry
this is further evidence of my inadequacy,
Jurors crossing me off the list with confidence.
I hope describing this expels the thought.
If it lingers, I won’t have a cerebral drawer
to fold it back into.
I’ve always been a bad folder.
Like the cell that splits and splits infinitely
until it is a person.
I must be faster. My self-invention must be faster.
The asymptotic speed of life
makes me crave the luxury of nine
whole
months
Much ado, much to do. I’ve wasted my time thinking.
I am so tired.
My indecision and my constant sentiment of overload
wastes the cells I’ve been given
I don’t feel pure enough to equate myself with a baby bird,
yet it’s all that comes to mind when I feel this way.
Roll me, cool and unaware, in the leaves, in the covers
I’ll just tell them I left my costumes at home
I will be asleep, waiting in the womb of the world
Watching the colors bloom and bleed in the warm emptiness
beyond my shuttered eyelids.
Hibernation is addictive.
Of the many things I should be today,
I can’t bear to be anything but this.