Siddhartha as a boy is willful:
shirks his chores and doesn’t listen
to his Mom — who maybe knows,
but doesn’t really care that his en-

lightenment one day inspires
a needful world. Instead, she’d quite
prefer Siddhartha do his homework.
Tell me (she says) this enlight-

enment, it pays? You’ll need a job,
it’s no fun living always tighten-
ing your belt, believe you me.
At least a fall-back when enlighten-

ment won’t make ends meet!  — It’s well
Siddhartha pays no mind, content
to poke about, mindfully aimless,
ambling toward enlightenment.

Forget forward progress, let’s repetition! The endless cycle taught by the Buddha, as filtered through my own relentless economic anxiety and inspired by NaPoWriMo.

Image: Young Buddha by Ishikawa Ken, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.