white keys

a poem from the corner of a tiny coffee shop on a rainy monday i'm fallibly dressed for

Tapping on white keys
I wonder if I was a piano in my past life.
This confuses me.

I phone my mom to ask what she thinks.
“Seems reasonable,” she says.
“But only in minor scale.”
My mother believes in reincarnation selectively.

I hang up
and continue playing ineptly,
like furniture remembering fire.
I press the keys as I would an unanswered doorbell.

Things changed
when I began reading Buddhism
as a prose style.

Soon enough
everything sticks to me -
lint, small griefs, extraterrestrials, the smell of rain on concrete.

Is it really as sad as you make it out to be,
this life?

I tuck a feather behind my ear
and call it freedom.
The feather disagrees
but stays.
Enlightenment will find me
as dust finds a windowsill
sometime in the afternoon,
having nowhere else to go.