Coffee dripping on documents that mean
nothing, measure nothing,
while hidden deeper a pulse beats,
and against the fluorescent flicker
happiness arrives sideways:
in the crack between elevator doors
where reflections become possibilities,
and you remember suddenly a gentle hand,
a touch as soft as sheets on a cold night.

Achievements taste like burnt toast
eaten alone and busy busy busy is the
meme in your head on this ordinary day,
broken only by a stranger whose smile
rewrites the morning and you are reminded
that contentment isn’t a destination
but a verb practiced in parking lots,
perfected in supermarket aisles where you
choose apples and somehow choose yourself.

Giving back—not grand gestures but the small offerings:
listening past the words and seeing a person’s tired eyes,
remembering the way someone takes their coffee,
planting care like seeds in soil that may bloom,
messy collaborations with laughter,
silences that hold more than words.

Achievement without connection tastes like aluminium,
connection without purpose dissolves like sugar in rain,
but here in this moment between washing dishes and checking email,
the deeper current runs carrying everything toward something,
unnamed, something whole, a sense of other.

Perhaps happiness hides in the hyphen between self-and-other,
between earning-and-being, between reaching-and-receiving,
so we measure what cannot be measured,
stock our hearts like pantries, invest in futures with
the compound interest of kindness or hate,
accruing daily in accounts we’ll never audit.

The poem writes itself in grocery lists and text threads,
in the trembling pause before responding,
in choosing gentleness when harshness would be easier.

Is this is how we build a life worth waking up to?
Thoughts as the coffee bubbles.

 

31/5/2025