I have a composition book from elementary school which is full of poems I wrote. Instead of daily journal entries, or letters to the teacher, or whatever else they had us write, I chose to write poems.

September 14 (I'm assuming, maybe, 1984)

The Giraffe's Breakfast

The giraffe has a neck
which stretches
so high
That sometimes I think
it can reach
to the sky
From his mouth
to his tummy
is such a long way,
his meals have to travel
for hours each day.
A giraffe would enjoy
his breakfast
much more
if he started
to eat it
the evening before.

This poem of mine always struck me the most amusing.

I was definitely sitting in class, not at all paying any attention, considering quietly to myself the premise of this poem.

Seriously; how long must it take food to travel down a giraffe's throat?

These are the kinds of questions that cost me many a note from my teacher to take home and get signed by my parents.

So, in some ways, things never change...

Although there aren't any more notes for my parents to sign, or for me to attempt to forge their signatures on, I can still meander off on some completely arbitrary aspect of reality. I find myself regularly pausing to contemplate just how many people might have stopped to admire a blooming flower. I wonder how many people might be making wishes on the rainbow I'm looking at, or a star, or anything; I just sort of wonder how many people wish in earnest anymore. How people must live with an actualized fear of there existing an eternal hell for them to reside in. Or a heaven. How so many people can personally conceptualize, categorize, and define in their own manner so much about their existence and yet, simultaneously assume that  everything is fated or destined and we have no free will. How others can actively deny their ability to take a hand in their own lives and assume destiny will take its course, even if it means they'll be miserable.

How so many people can find so much hope on the page of a best seller, yet can't find that same increment of hope in admiring a flower, or a rainbow, or a kitten, or a smiling old person, or a child laughing.

Or in the pure, unbridled emotion in the wailing of a newly made widow.

In the absolute finality of death, and in the human ability to persevere and not forget, but just keep going on regardless.

In a sunset. In roadkill. In the beautiful song of the morning birds waking your hung over ass up way too early.

It's life. It's all beautiful and ugly. It's a great big totally effed up mistake that's the most perfect thing ever.

Somehow I arrived here after posting a poem about a giraffe's digestion.