Thoughts. I have so many. If overthinking was a crime, I’d be serving a life sentence.
Maybe a run-on sentence.

—T. De Los Reyes, from “Read a Little Poetry”

Maybe not a crime, maybe more
of a grammatical sin, though maybe not,
the overthinking, the fly-by thoughts
zooming through, of course, it’s a life sentence,

born with this brain you can’t change,
and while it means that you barely draw
breath between thoughts, much less
plant a period between sentences, that

whoosh of material, those images, those
words, those snippets of music and lyrics,
scenes from movies you saw decades ago,
they’re part of the corpuscular river

rushing through the veins of your cranium,
and all those who urge you to slow down,
take a thought and chew on it for a bit, then
swallow it, let it go, this constant life review,

a revisitation of conversation and actions
about what has been or not, what might be,
is not always your friend, but hey, you can’t
help it, you chalk it up to a creative mind,

a brain built to juggle all manner of input,
and, by the way, where did you last see
those juggling balls, the ones you literally
used to toss in the air in front of college

students lost in their thoughts, you trying
to briefly still their wandering minds
and get them to focus on whatever you were
trying to teach them, only later did it hit you

that you had no control over what stuck
in their brains, over what they might take
with them, but oh, how they’d giggle as you
literally kept three balls in the air, hoping

a clever metaphor would emerge from your
mouth, listening to them guffaw when you
dropped a ball, how someone would retrieve it,
toss it back to you mid-juggle, one of the rare

moments when your great river of thoughts
temporarily stalled, when for some reason
you could focus on what was right in front of
your eyes, the loop-de-loop of pink rubber

balls landing softly in your hands, you
concentrating only on the catching and tossing,
breathing in time to the rhythm of controlled
flight of spherical objects, watching the cascade,

oh, yes, again, again, again.