Sophia Galifianakis
How to Make Smart Decisions
—and clearly defined alternatives
1. The Decision Maker’s Mind
Six feet tall standing in your doorway with a small-lipped smile. Savant.
Mischievous. He presents his latest thought for holding you up.
You furrow your brow and respond, your book idea sucks, or
it’s already been done. He sneers. Gusts some
puffed up words, then proceeds to gossip
to everyone. No!
He says nothing. Nothing at all.
His words pop off like a Kindle light: gone.
2. The Human Brain Can Sabotage
He appears again, with ideas for lunch. He’s bored
in his skin, spends days in the managed borders
of his brain to erase people and things, and scrawl
in place of evidence his projected revisions. It’s all
reality. He says, Newsflash! A man is here
to take you to lunch! How about Amer’s? You say,
piss off pig-shit. I’m busy. Don’t you get
that I don’t sit at this desk for fun? You don’t
care for his ego. That’s just not your thing. You’re mean
to the core because, after all, you need to protect
what matters most: your needs. So you sneer,
take a hike you dick. Eat this. And slam the door
3. On Objective Measures of Distance
relieved. You don’t know how to walk on eggshells,
to quell moods or diffuse a seething rave. So you stay
away from this guy who keeps coming around
with his too tight tie. You’ve seen how he erupts under
the high stakes of a verbal blunder, how he scorns,
how he demands honor. The thought
that you would even consider pleasing his whims, put
his moods before your needs? As if you would give him
your blood if he asked you to bleed. You could never
forget who you are, what you believe, change
the direction of your life, ignore your kids, drive out
the light, see what he sees, bring your life slowly
to its knees, ungut your soul, hammer your dreams.
Costs and benefits, girl. Please!
4. The Invisible Nature of Traps
They tease.
Only a fool would hide behind the fallacy
of humility. Repeat after me:
I cannot touch you. You are not worthy. I am not sorry.
That’s how it is. That’s what I see. There’s nothing
to mourn now. Nothing
to grieve. No need for betrayal, no
whirlwind of loss to funnel my vision of us into fog. You see:
go od decisions. No need
to long for the longing that’s gone. You spot every red flag
before it pops up, and—you can’t even help it—you just walk off.
And now, you have fallen in love.
An Appraisal of Things
This miscellaneous clutter
of all I can without content
describe as my survival
takes days I’ve wagered, risks
I might have loved,
takes grief, takes possibility,
and cheapens each to bric-a-brac
I’ll nod at as I pass
on dusted, well-kempt shelves
that no one really looks at.
To have, to be, thieved
metaphors of need gone
artlessly, while see
went into hiding for fear
of being quantifiably thinged.