Up and to the Right

The trick to finding an answer

I was told

is to look up and to the right.

I try till my eyes hurt,

but the fog of my thoughts are in the way.

All the things I need to remember,

like where my car is parked, who’s mad

at whom, what kind of cake she wants for her birthday.

That one song we sang today

blares, shwee oot doot dot doo dot da

bad do bop dwee bah doo dah,

a cacophony of scatting,

my alto harmony singing out the loudest,

The things I try to forget.

My eyes keep wandering back

to the back wall, to behind

where a string of  posters scream inspiration

at me, to back on that day

when the man with no arms talked to us

about following our dreams and all of that.

Up and to the right,

to the right, to the right

take it back now ya’ll. Two hops this time

One-- STOP IT—two, three, four,

I declare a thumb war.

My mind is loud, without much sense,

like those modern paintings they call abstract.

Breaking through the wall of noise

is like breaking through a defensive line.

Maybe below all this noise are the real answers.

Like who we are or why we’re here.

Or maybe I will just find a few answers,

Like the formula for the inverse of cosine.

Up and to the right.

Or maybe it’s left.

I don’t know how she expects me to finish,

this test with all the noise in here.