Listing to Port

I list through life,
never on an even keel.
To port I head,
through an ocean littered
with paper reminders of journeys begun
and never finished,
or journeys finished and never started,
or journeys I hope yet to take.

Every Sunday
I toss out lists that

• have everything marked off (3%), or
• have lost their relevance, checked off or not (97%).

I save those that
even if no longer pertinent
remind me how silly my lists are.
Written hurriedly,
the words resemble another language
(one I don’t know).
I saw one today I thought said:
Look up new problems.
Ha! Apparently,
I need more of them.
(Problems, not lists, that is.)
What I’d actually written was
Look up new patterns.
Not a bad idea, I thought.

I like going through the lists
that are left;
listing, always listing,
to port.

April 9, 2012
Salt Lake City, Utah