It’s a grand problem to have—
the need to be perfect.
It’s like the problem
when the extension of summer
bleeds into months of school days
or the worry over weekend plans.
This kind of problem is present
because a variety of needs have
been abundantly met.
Here I am,
fully capable of walking
on two sturdy legs half a mile
to the local smalltown grocery store,
a square of plastic money to
momentarily present in exchange
for a heady bundle of foodstuff,
experienced years of cooking how-to
crammed in my head from a patient mother,
electricity that sparkles overhead lights
and flames that cook in minutes,
air that ripples from the heater
and an added heap of blankets
to ward off the frigid cold of the outside world,
the voice of a loved one carrying a deep conversation
through a thin electric sliver of magical convenience....
I have everything I could need
and then more than that.
Yet.
The comforts of life so easily,
overly sufficiently,
taken care of
leave me with a yearning
to find more for myself.
I need to be at a
level that meets my
overwhelmingly lofty standards
of quintessence.
I have superfluous oceans of time
to analyze the aching inadequacies
in the work I do,
in the daily tasks of mundane living
and in the drive to an ideal successful lifestyle:
a gritty agony of mental absolutes.
The ease it takes to pile on aggravations--
of all that goes left undone at the
breaking of darkness at night.
They swim in self-defeating cycles,
overlapping each other,
a mass of swarming cells.
A litany of check boxes unmarked
haunts my headaches.
The tasks that have been ticked off
irritate me with what
they lack in expert finesse.
I could have done better.
The luxury of perfection seeking
ignores all that I already am capable of.
An indifference permeates my chase.
I am never perfectly adept,
perfectly on time, perfectly strong,
perfectly anything...
And, yet, I have so much that I have and so much that I am.
