Here I sit at a desk that was once my mother’s,
Now papered with little yellow sticky notes.
Perhaps at one time it was neat and tidy, the way my mother is,
But now it’s a constellation of my wandering thoughts,
And things I must remember to do.

Clinging on to each other with all their might,
Little golden papers inscribed with various shades of ink,
At any moment, one may fall to the ground, like an oak leaf in a September breeze,
Finally letting go of its branch and swimming to the ground with a sigh,
To be swept away and forgotten.

Perhaps that little paper held a word I liked,
Or some mundane task that now I’ll never remember to do,
Perhaps it was a lyric, a fragment of a song I heard and found memorable,
A perfect little collection of words strung together like lace,
Leaving an empty space in the yellow foliage.

Here I sit at a desk that was once my mother’s,
That is now papered with small yellow sticky notes,
Thinking that there’s beauty in the way things are, a sort of cadence to the rhythm of everything,
Searching for the meaning of life in a cluster of yellow sticky notes,
Included in a list of chores, or written between the words of a love song.