We balance hours on a tilted plate Each chore an angle we negotiate The faucet drips a fractured rhyme— A sonnet for the grease we can’t unwind The calendar’s spine creaks with doubt A spine of days we’re carved without Praise be to the tilt of the leaning tower The weight we carry in borrowed power Praise be to the drip that charts our toll— The silent tax on the unslept soul Your sigh etches lines in the window’s haze A fresco of fatigue in the morning’s gaze The kettle sings a tune half-learned— A hymn for the bridges we never burned The calendar’s spine creaks with doubt A spine of days we’re carved without Praise be to the tilt of the leaning tower The weight we carry in borrowed power Praise be to the drip that charts our toll— The silent tax on the unslept soul The broom writes psalms on linoleum floors Each sweep a verse that the grime ignores We scrub the stains that time won’t keep— A liturgy of loss, a vigil cheap We measure life in unkept vows In the slant of Sun that the blinds allow Praise be to the seams we choose to sow— The only maps of the paths we know