Learning to Plumb - March 8 2024

 

Learning to Plumb

March 8 2024

I am not mechanical,

not good with my hands.

So everything to me

is a black box;

how the toilet flushes

the fridge stays cold,

how I can pick up the phone

and talk

to the other side of the world

as if we we’re face-to-face.

Forget about the internet

airplanes

photosynthesis.

Yet I've become jaded;

accept the miraculous

as a given,

find myself impatient

for the next best thing.

But rarely consider

the many great minds

toiling in anonymity

who keep the machinery running.

The ones who came before

on whose shoulders we stand.

To so depend on others,

yet claim to be

a self-made man

strikes me as not only unbecoming

but unconscionably smug.

A humble man

would show gratitude, not contempt.

But for me, it's incompetence

that rescues my virtue.

Because a man

who can barely change a lightbulb

knows he can’t succeed on his own.

Not when the fridge

gives up the ghost,

the toilet plugs

and overflows.

Thank God for plungers

sponges

mops.

For the expert I called

who’s willing to come,

the years he spent

learning to plumb.