Thank you stock image!

Homework

Recently I told a client
I have been quite sad for most of my life.
I was trying to normalize sadness.
It was a brief exchange and
I worried later,
had I overstepped,
had I oversimplified,
was it sadness really?

It is a sink inky emotion,
an anemone always sifting,
with slightly stingy surfaces motion,
a ballad with many verses
trying to find the chorus.

I keep a word list and rearrange
them in an order of increasing lift.
This week each are both a noun and a verb -
quarrel, wend, flank and palm, pleat.
They are sad and less sad words.
The actor Dax Shepherd
said he stopped writing screenplays
because being a writer
is like always having homework.
Isn’t being human I want to ask him.