Abundance Principle

You know how it is when you open a brand new tube of toothpaste,
And you put a big blob of it on your toothbrush,
Just like the beautiful people on the toothpaste commercials do?

You brush your teeth with a cheesy grin,
Cheating the dentist out of his millions,
And all is well until you get a big dent in the middle of your toothpaste tube.

Because then you see that you're down to half empty.
You dab a mere dot,
Which the hygienists assure us is plenty,
But we feel it's not
Unless it's fluoridated.

But the smile is now wan as you stare at yourself in the mirror,
And you notice your hair needs a doin'
If you're going to keep up with the Joneses.

Then, first thing you know,
You're down, a quart low,
Squeezing the tube with a roller.
Barely enough to dot an I,
And you'll have to scrub hard to cross all your T's
While you gottem.

And we won't talk about bottoms here,
But the same principal is abundantly clear
When it comes to toilet paper.

-jenn

I'm caught in the middle
Somewhere way between
Fall boots and football,
Somewhere between the crowd turning me on,
And the crowd turning on me.

There is a fine line in life
That many say one should not cross,
But I say,
One must bring one's big hand
And one's little hand
All the way up to the stroke of midnight and beyond
When attempting to live the dream,
In order to assess what is real,
And what will turn back into pumpkins and rats.

-jenn

Mother Earth is a big mama possum
With us on her back,
And we ain't gettin' nowhere really
Unless she takes us.
We can fight and jostle as she goes,
Tryin' ta get some better position,
But the only revolution that matters
Is her around the sun.

But when we die,
Some say we fly to where our treasure is.
Mama Possum shakes us free
To go where we want to go.
We may find ourselves on the forest floor,
Or fighting a war we can't win,
Or seeking knowledge in the akashic college of old.
But whatever we do and wherever we go,
Why do I feel like we will know
That our questions of who had it right here on earth
And who had it wrong
Will be like a baby possum asking it's mama
What kind of cheese the moon is made of.

-jenn

All the grizzlies look the same.
The polar bears do, too.
All the giraffes--so similar,
The zebra, the okapi, here at the zoo,
The deer mice, the house mice,
The meerkats, the wallaby, the kangaroo,
The markings, the coats,
Are so like the others of their species.

But look at the stream of human beings
Tramping along the boardwalk
To view the animals,
Hair color, eye color,
Size and shape---
A neon sign of diversity
In the animal kingdom.

Well, us, and the goats.

-jenn

We need Hawks and we need Doves,
Here, in the animal kingdom.
The law of the jungle is the secret way
That keeps us in balance and in health,
In rivulets that we can't see.

But the Great Spirit displays its complex grandeur
Through every one and every thing that lives,
Through the quick glances we might catch of all the individual ones.
We can, if we try, put together,
The cosmic composite,
So that we can fathom the entirety,
Though we might never truly know it.

But this is the animal kingdom.
What of we humans and our complicated societies?
I'm not sure, but I feel it is the same.

And so, My Brother, My Sister, just maybe,
The one you hate,
The one you call 'enemy,'
Is a part and parcel of yourself.

But if you find that too hard to swallow,
Maybe you could at least admit
That your enemy is also somehow a child of the Great Spirit.

-jenn

I've learned to leave when the cool kids leave,
And not to show up
At places they don't go.

Now I'm not cool,
But there's a reason they are,
And we could all learn from that.

-jenn

I remember a church potluck dinner.
I was standing in line
Right behind a woman who had already been through once.
She turned to show me her plate
And pointed to something that hadn't quite satisfied her delicate palate.
"Don't get any of this," she said,
And pointed with her fork to a broccoli slaw.
"It's bitter!" she said as she
Clinched her jaw in an unhappy grimace.

"I made that," I said,
And her eyes got big,
Her jaw unclenched and hung agape.
"I'm just kidding," I said,
"But I could've made it."

It's one thing to warn others of some deadly thing
That waits to bring a mortal fate,
But to criticize food at a church social,
Well, now that's just bad taste.

-jenn