Once, while wandering around
a college campus at night,
in a locker room for med students,
I took a bunch of magnets
off a bunch of lockers

and threw them onto other lockers.
Some landed on the top — the roof,
we might as well call it; it was
that inaccessible. I don’t know why
I did that. At the time, I thought

it was all OK — I wasn’t
stealing them, and it would be
easy enough to find them later,
plus a med student is what, 22?

An adult, so it’s not like
anyone would be sad over
a stupid thing like magnets.

Then I saw how high the
locker roof was, how futile
it would be to search for
many of the lost. I was

ashamed. A few years later,
I learned that an adult
can indeed be very sad over
small objects, small acts.