A Poem Prompted by a Question: What if I Were Just Useless?

What if I were just useless? 

What if I lay down on my back and felt the earth beneath me? 

What if I sighed deeply and felt my heart beating? 

What if I watched the branches of the cherry tree wavering above me, the whirling flocks of starlings, the American mountain ash rising from the stump? 

What if I held my breath and let the orb-weavers crawl over me and hug me into the earth? 

Maybe today, then, I will do nothing, but lie in this patch of dandelions. 

What if I flopped down beside the endangered sequoia tree in Grand Avenue Park and did nothing there? 

As the tree does nothing, just look at it, honestly, standing there so still, or mostly still, just taking up so much space in the sky. 

What if I looked the American Crow in the eye and pulled a shiny button from my coat and tossed it into the air? As a distraction. 

What if I plucked  a sunflower seed from my pocket and placed it into the hands of the Eastern Grey Squirrel? Who is the usurper of the indigenous Western gray, a threatened species. 

What if I was that sunflower seed sat in the earth all winter long extremely still? 

What if I took a nap? 

A very long one. 

Yes, what if I rest, 

What then, come springtime? 

What if I were just? 

What if I said, “I’m sorry, capitalism. I am sorry, America. I really cannot participate.”? And instead I listened to the wind blow and the flow of Woods Creek down to the Salish Sea. 

What if I decided not to do the work of millions of monkeys and carry stones too big for myself and be rewarded by Lord Rama with three stripes along my back? 

What if I am not a devoted squirrel? But a cheeky one. 

What if the world asked nothing of me, but to be? 

What if I believed it? 

What if I am a sad, lonely, troubled, angry creature and I take myself into the temperate Marine West Coast Forests and I let my hair grow mossy long and cover myself in mud and walk through wet sticks? 

What if sightings of myself become so rare and hazy that I begin to live in realms of fantasy? 

What if, so long as we are imagining, I am magical? 

What if I am a muse? 

What if I am an animal who only exists in the dreams of someone I have yet to meet? 

What if, by asking this question, I have created an alternate universe? Another reality. 

Say the spell three times with me: 

What if? What if? What if? 

What if I were less? 

Less than my sadness and anger and loneliness, less than my thoughts… 

So, what? So, what? So, what? 

What if I lived in the moment and my emotions were moments and I shook them out of my body when I was done with them? 

What if I felt, momentarily, ecstatic? 

What if I were in awe? 

What if I were amazed? 

What if I walked around wide-eyed, entranced by every uselessness I could encounter? 

What if I were so, so, so, small and insignificant? 

What if that were my superpower? 

What if I were useless? 

Utterly. Hopelessly. Incomparably without use. 

What if all I could do was to cry and smile and despair and love and just be? 

What if, the world said, “Yes. This is what I have been waiting for child, from you, this is the uselessness wanted.”? 

Then some monk, some prophet, some seer, some magician, some friend might come and breathe with me. 

Someone might say, “Ah!” and drape me in flowers and colored robes and place me statuesque among every blade of grass, seed, spider, bird, squirrel, tree, plant, creek, river, raindrop, dewdrop, moonbeam, starshine, and sunray… 

All of these natural beings made of light, which as you can see, and which everyone knows, contribute absolutely nothing to this world. They just are it. 

What if, all of this? Then, what would I eat? 

What if I turned all of this sadness and longing into a song and sang it to a scared shelter dog named after a cat who is afraid of sound and panics, shaking in the cold? 

Sing with me: 

What if I were useless? 

What if I were just useless? 

 Would you still love me Kitty girl? 

 Would you still come inside? 

What if I noticed now that scared and sacred are nearly the same word? 

What if, all of that? What would be the uselessness, then?