Love Poem to my Obligations.

Someone who partially knew me 

termed me not a workaholic, rather 

a produce-aholic. Accurate. Snappy. 

Difficult to sustain. 

My way of sustaining is to trot upon

the hamster wheel, despite my aversion 

to rodents. My brother kept

gerbils (no reference to R. Gere, please).

Anyway, I run on full or empty equally. 

I always run as if I had only so much time 

to complete the self-assigned obligations

I gather in my arms, these figurative 

daffodils, irises, hyacinths, crocuses, 

alongside miniscule wildflowers with flesh petals, 

my favorite African daisies that peek up 

from the medians along the highways. 

Speaking of which, quality always overtakes

quantity. So many of my obligations 

look like spreadsheets, considerably less fetching

than the profusion of fresh small growing things. 

So how, for the love of God, is this a love poem?

I tend even when I do not intend to love 

what is around me. Surround myself with a host 

of things that must be done that I can do, 

I grew up escaping various uninteresting people 

by skittering off to the university library 

where I could look out on peaceful snow 

from the thirteenth-floor carrel and let perceptions flow 

onto page after page I carried home to my upstairs room 

to peck away on my upright Underwood machine,

fulfilling an assignment with joy. Work left-justifies me 

to achieve and succeed, recapture the loss of something 

unquantifiable. I love getting things done, 

comparatively less painfully than leaving things 

to a procrastinated sprawl of dirty dishes, unmade bed, 

streaky windows, and trash in the receptacle piled chest high. 

My obligations when completed may mean zilch, and yet,

and yet, they fuel me. They buoy my musculature, 

my little bones, the place atop my head still healing

from staples left in surgery. 

My fingers grasping for a keyboard that knows me better than

the White Tank Mountains, red rock country,

the lithe stems of wildflowers coming to bloom

as spring hints itself awake.