Truth to tell, I'm more in a mood to be writing poetry, but a poem would by nature defy that which I am trying to say. I shall make this very clear up front: the subject I will be addressing is life. A number of intriguing thoughts are bouncing round my brain and I'd like to capture them on paper. This has the immediate side effect, of course, of saving the ink in the pen from going to waste (i.e., staying inside the pen). Thus the title.

Picture yourself going window-shopping. I know that this is probably not something you'd like to picture yourself doing, but bear with me. You're walking along at a leisurely pace, musing upon the ownership of the faded, dusty objects in the display windows, and you come across one display in particular that freezes you solid in mid-stride. You quizzically ponder the logic of what you are now staring at in total unfamiliarity. In your stupor, you fail to notice the look of stupidity you now exhibit, the one that is being reflected directly back into your face by the store window. The store window itself has been defaced with the name of the store. Amid the display is an oddly-placed support column. In the interests of making the storefront aesthetically pleasing, the store has smothered the column with four tall mirrors, one which lies parallel to the store window. This mirror reflects the store name painted on the window. The name from that vantage point (behind the glass) is backwards, however and so thus is reflected forwards. This forward reflection by the mirror is entirely foreign to the mind's concept of the behavior of a mirror, and a number of moments (three or four) are required for this to register logically. The initial shock, however, is exactly like life.

Those of you who love to analyze and interpret should stop right here, for I am on the verge of explaining the last sentence of that paragraph. I deplore analysis and interpretation because I so often misinterpret and see others misinterpret. Everybody sees things in a different light, and trying to discover which light somebody else used by subjecting their works of penmanship to your reading light becomes a fruitless endeavor. The vagaries of poets force one to re-dig a hole where a bottomless pit has been filled up. Therefore, I say this straight out: what I meant when I said that was exactly that. Under my light, what I wrote makes perfect sense. Under someone else's light, I could be saying life is weird, but to me life makes perfect, logical sense. I might also have been making a vague and unrelated comment in an attempt to be funny. Neither of these was my intent. I discourage anyone from pursuing a connection, and encourage everyone to discover their own personal beliefs of life, and to write them down, preferably with the ink that is now being wasted in unused pens around the globe. n