The Button

Sometimes I think every second I spend writing
would be better spent on something else.
When it gets really bad, this misplaced sense
of usefulness, I imagine a button
that when pressed makes me stop
caring altogether about writing, which in turn
gives me hope anything could be this button.

You might see me in the grocery store touch a potato.
You might catch me on the couch
pointing the remote at myself.
Soft nights spent pressed against each other.
Nothing happens, of course,
which is another way of saying everything does.

Maybe the button itself is the problem,
not the concept but the fact of it. Of them.
We use one to add foam, another to ignore
our mothers, a third pays strangers to take us home.
The button is our inability to be ourselves.

In a field, in a song, in a dream, an owl screeches
and the moon burns orange for no reason.
I push it back into the universe
with a finger. The doors close or they open.
It doesn’t matter or it matters more than anything else.
No one knows where the elevator goes.