A tightly knit ball of crochet thread
Is pretty much all I am right now.
I'm blue,
The aqua-turquoise kind
And a little low quality, if I'm being honest here.
Really, I should be happy.
Cause of that sudden popularity of crochet right now,
Me and my kind really have a real chance of being chosen.
We're stocked near the middle of the shop right now,
Instead of the back.
Arranged by the shopkeeper
In the perfect rainbow
To show off our range.
I, unfortunately, am not technically in the front.
More of at the very back of the very middle,
If you get my drift.
Cause, thing is, when we were stocking,
A little accident caused my seal to rupture,
And there I went spinning off,
The blue of my soul unfurling as I went
Seeing all the world for the very first time,
Watching the beautiful mid-morning rush of people around me-
Until a bunch of them stepped on my thread and well.
Suffice it to say I've never felt such pain before.
That is when the shopkeeper noticed me,
Finally
When I was all dirty and ruined and unspooled.
She was in a hurry,
Dirty and ruined and unspooled herself,
But even with her anger and irritation (and, I suspect, pay)
She wound me back up, and dumped me promptly
Back on the shelf.
(Near the back end though,
For the ones desperate enough to buy me.)
I'll tell you right now-
Those few seconds for which I
Was unspooled was the best of my impossible little life.
It was also, perhaps with design, the worst
of my impossible little life.
No matter how much the shopkeeper tries,
And no matter how much anyone wishes so,
I can never be as spooled as I was originally.
I am gone, do you understand?
The very thing that I am made for is what destroyed me.
Simply because I did it at the wrong time.
I mean, not only that, but because I
Let myself be unspooled in the first place.
Anyway, I'm an old yarn now.
Sat on the bench so long, and watched all my peers go
They became bags, and totes, and sweaters, and cardigans.
And I remained a wrongly-wrapped ball of crochet thread.
I tell the youngsters now,
The ones who have multiple colors,
Who start from purple and end in red and have pink in the middle.
I tell them, from my fading blue,
Of why one must never unspool.
Because once you do, you can never be wrapped as tight again.
(And if you do open up your heart to someone,
Be sure they know how to crochet.
Cause otherwise, you'd have a heart full of tangled wool,
And your own sad self left to deal with it.)