the other day, i had a ball of yarn,
and i turned around for a second
and the cat knocked it off the table
to bat it around for a while.
and when I returned,
it was a lumpy mass of tangles

and i sighed to myself, and i thought,
‘this is my life.’
and then, i realized,
it really is.

and i felt so pleased
that i’d realized something so profound
but that wouldn’t clean up the mess,
so i sat on the floor
drew the yarn close,
and started to untangle it

it started as a straight section,
looped around itself
but easy enough
a wee bit repetitive,
but then, i didn’t know any better
for all i knew, it all was like that

then, a couple feet later,
came the first knot
it could have gone any of three
different paths
but i picked the shortest one
and ran into more knots
than i would have, picking
the harder route

after a while
i got into a kind of rhythm
straight, repetitive for a while
then tons of tangles
but once i got through the hard parts
it was smooth sailing once again

at one part, it seemed too much to deal with.
i just wanted to cut it off,
start again
but then i realized
that i’m not a quitter
so i gritted my teeth,
steeled my jaw,
clawed through the tangles
and made it through

the rest, i only think it fair to state
was far easier

finally, i’d come to the end of the yarn
i’d made it into something,
a beautiful sphere of fiber
something i’d treasure because of the amount of work i put into it
maybe to others it would seem like nothing
but to me, it was special

so i turned around for a moment
to enjoy my success
and the cat knocked it off the table
and it all fell apart again

but i couldn’t get mad
she was a cat, after all
and that’s just life