Sitting Still - Oct 18 2026

 

Sitting Still

Oct 18 2026

Sit still, I tell myself.

Just as 3rd graders, confined to their desks

are instructed;

the fidgeting boy 5 rows back,

the girl in the corduroy jumper

fussing with her braids.

The antsy child who wasn’t fed

and barely slept 

with all that shouting through the wall. 

Sitting is hard for kids,

fizzing with energy

like carbonated drinks

shaken cold,

Coca Cola over ice.

So why can’t I?

Belly up to the desk

put pen to paper?

A white page

against the darkly stained wood,

staring blankly back at me

like a bottomless hole

I need to fill by deadline.

But there are blue skies,

and through the open window

the sound of children at play.

I am a child again, in that 3rd grade class

staring out the big bank of windows

at a grassy playing field.

Is it true 

that when a shark stops moving it dies?

Perhaps we weren’t made to sit still.

Perhaps you have to get out

immersed

in the sturm und drang of a life.

Because sitting at a desk

with a bite-mark riddled pen

looking out an open window,

what is there to write about

but eye strain and sore teeth?

And who wants to read about a writer’s angst?

Which is when I fell into it.

That gaping hole

became a portal into other worlds,

like the mirror in Alice,

the magic door

in the dusty wardrobe

that led to Narnia.

So even though I’m sitting still 

my mind is travelling.

Whether to a tea party in Wonderland

where it’s always 6 pm,

or back in time

to a Grade 3 class

5 rows back.

Where an 8 year

with a pencil between his teeth

daydreams who knows what.

Perhaps imagining 

what he’ll become

50 years from now.

I no longer sit at desk with pen in hand. I recline in my easy chair, tapping on the keyboard of my iPad.

Neither do I don’t get writer’s block. If anything, its opposite.  Perhaps “writer’s logorrhoea”? 

Do I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting? Yes; and have no trouble sitting still while I’m writing and in that delightful flow state when time disappears. (I’ve written before about once being so immersed I only noticed later on that the space heater near my leg had given me a 2nd degree burn!)

So the poem is — as usual — not autobiographical. But the notion of mind travel is    . . . because it’s universal. One doesn’t need to move travel. The mind wanders. Sitting still may be unnatural, and it may be susceptible to distraction, but it can also be a ticket to anything and anywhere. 

As usual, I had no idea where this poem would go. It truly felt like taking dictation as one word after another came to me. So I’m delighted it found its way to this ending, the closed time loop between the writer’s older and younger self: one looking ahead, the other looking back. 

Btw, to answer the question the poem poses, only some species of shark have to keep swimming to keep water flowing over their gills (“ram ventilation”). Others can pump oxygenated water through their gills using mouth and throat muscles (“buccal pumping”). (That is, according to Gemini AI.)

Coke is still made with coca, but the cocaine is now chemically removed. So the original unadulterated Coke would have been an even better analogy for an antsy kid! Although a good editor would probably remove the Coca Cola line entirely — redundant. Fortunately, I’m my own editor (and probably a bad one!), so free to indulge.

My thanks to Joshua Rothman, whose piece in the New Yorker (Why is it So Hard to Sit Still?) inspired this: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/why-cant-you-sit-still