Words' Worth

poem by twinklydog.

I am irresponsible with money. I don’t save for the things I want or need; I get them on credit or loan, accept them as gifts. As a teen, I spent money as soon as I made it, then made some more and spent it. As an adult, I have learned to spend it before I make it.

I waste food. At the farmers’ market, I swoon over and snag some sugar beets before I know what to do with them. I squander yellow squashes and zucchinis. I wax romantic over wax beans and then forget they’re in the fridge until they’ve brown, mushy spots. I ogle purple peppers, then pick a peck, only to have them pickle in the veggie drawer.

I am irritable with my family. I snap at my daughter in response to a question, expect my husband to vacuum the carpet with no thanks. I criticize my sister and whine at my parents. I yell at the dogs, especially the brown boy dog because he is what a brown boy dog is.

I misspend time. Like money, I know there will be more tomorrow. So if I sit here, in this chair, all day, watching videos by a German death metal band, which I found through a Google search after reading an interesting poem on the poetry forum, where I had just spent an hour reading and commenting on poems while waiting for pictures of my pets to upload to Dogster, then I know it is just a day, one day, out of 15,565 days of my life already lived. It is mine to misspend. And another tomorrow, if I so choose.

I abuse my body. Though I am hyper aware of my body and its flaws, I am not conscientious about what I put into it. I should stay away from sugar and flour, which contribute to insomnia, and sugar and chocolate, which contribute to migraines, and sugar and flour and chocolate, which contribute to fat. I should continue with my running, follow my doctor’s advice and wear sunscreen. I quit smoking for my daughter, but I could easily be encouraged to start again.

Though my biggest fear is that I will lose my sight, I have twice had glass and mirror silver removed from my eyes. Why aren’t goggles a part of my regular mosaic uniform?

My second biggest fear is an insomnia relapse. I take my magnesium and calcium religiously, but I can’t control myself with sheet cake or French fries.

I am not careful. I have chopped off the tip of my thumb with an X-acto knife. I have thrown a basketball at my daughter’s nose while aiming for her chest. I have spilled things. I have missed a spot.

I am a boob, an oaf, an ox. I lumber. I treat everything from money to vision as if it were disposable and then lament its loss—sometimes for a minute, sometimes for a decade.

I said in my grad school application that I am many things, but I am a writer first. Perhaps writing is the one thing that I do not take for granted. I once stopped writing for six years and almost went insane. Now I practice every day because I know how quickly a sense of place can atrophy when a sense of sentence does, how rapidly a vocabulary can rust. I know the frozen cogs of writer’s block, the stuck wheel of analogy and metaphor.

I take care with my words. I draft and redraft. I roll them around on my tongue, silently and aloud. In a few weeks, wax beans might be rhubarb for the alliteration; a semicolon will replace an and; the first paragraph will become the third. Words are at once fragile and durable. You must be careful with them because they last.

If I have used an unkind set of words with you, then it is probably not my writing that I have taken for granted. I hope you will forgive me—and in a week, rather than a decade.


Written for the Essay This! project, Week Seven.