I just set off the fire alarm in our house.

That doesn't take much talent, actually.  I'm glad that they [we have TWO] are so sensitive, but anymore, you singe toast, and there they go.  So in our house, setting the alarms off isn't a big deal.

Except it's nearly 3am.  I'm gonna get in trouble.  :p

But hey.  The candles help me think!

Ever since I woke up today,
a song has been playing uncontrollably
in my head--a tape looping

over the spools of the brain,
a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,
mad fan belt of a tune.

It must have escaped from the radio
last night on the drive home
and tunneled while I slept

from my ears to the center of my cortex.
It is a song so cloying and vapid
I won't even bother mentioning the title,

but on it plays as if I were on a turntable
covered with dancing children
and their spooky pantomimes,

as if everything I had ever learned
was slowly being replaced
by its slinky chords and the puffballs of its lyrics.

It played while I watered the plant
and continued when I brought in the mail
and fanned out the letters on a table.

It repeated itself when I took a walk
and watched from a bridge
brown leaves floating in the channels of a current.

In the late afternoon it seemed to fade,
but I heard it again at the restaurant
when I peered in at the lobsters

lying on the bottom of an illuminated
tank which was filled to the brim
with their copious tears.

And now at this dark window
in the middle of the night
I am beginning to think

I could be listening to music of the spheres,
the sound no one ever hears
because it has been playing forever,

Only the spheres are colored pool balls,
and the music is oozing from a jukebox
whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.


-Billy Collins

Facebook wished me a happy birthday today.

I'm kinda creeped out, even though I know it's easily explained.