Busyness - Oct 8 2025

 

Busyness

Oct 8 2025

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;  

I know the voices dying with a dying fall  

Beneath the music from a farther room.  

So how should I presume?

(T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Eliot counted out his life 

in coffee spoons.

While I look back

at all the to-do lists

that have littered my life,

the small pieces of paper

I’ve balled-up and tossed 

in a long trail behind me.

The life of a completist,

smugly satisfied

with boxes checked-off.

Because I was raised to be productive;

like a shark, who must swim to breathe

forward motion is everything.

Stop to smell the coffee

and you risk the sin of sloth;

and if you must commit a deadly sin

why not one that's fun?

I should have kept all those lists,

an archive 

of — if not a life well-lived — then at least a life of busyness.

And if never quite complete

 — because more always needs doing —

at least it will have been

an orderly one.

Nothing permanent, of course;

no monuments,

no legacy

of virtue or vice

to account for in the afterlife,

just the small diurnal chores

that become hard to ignore

once they’ve made the list.

And if, in some altrnative life

I’d given in

to a temporary madness?

I don't mean living in squalor

or tripping ayahuasca;

I mean walking the dogs

when I should have been at work,

sipping coffee on the deck

as the sun sets and shadows lengthen,

writing poems

the world wouldn’t miss

and no one really cares for?

But no, I was raised too well for that.

And time is wasting

when there are coffee cups to sort 

saucers to stack,

spoons

impatiently waiting

to return to their drawer.

And with garbage day

the next chore to check,

there's a rubbish bin of lists

waiting by the door.

According to the rules, of course:

out by the curb

the night before.