My best thoughts arrive when
I wait for my towels to be cleaned.

Leaning over the sturdy white machine,
contemplating life's intricacies
and delving into quixotic thoughts only suitable
for my delicates in their spin cycle,
that's when it happens.

Suddenly, as the bumps and whirrs of a laundry room
fill my headspace, I am
Socrates, I am Plato,
one finger heaven-oriented as my clothes spin,
spin, spin.

I can only imagine that Phaedo was
conceived in the throes of ancient laundering.

As slaving women with their washboards
worked tirelessly on his thinking linens,
that's when Plato must have done his
best philosophizing,
when Napoleon felt his tallest.