The poet critically considers his recent purchase of a ceramic teapot made in China, both as teapot and metaphor for himself.

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This teapot
That I just bought
Is not necessarily safe.
This ceramic pot

Made in China
With a three year warranty
Against flaws in manufacture
Is not as innocent as it appears.

It might leach metals.
I was going to return it
But that was last night.
This morning I

Opened the box
Removed it from its cardboard
Form-fitting packing
Saved the warranty

And brewed some tea.
All of my decisions
These days are based on ratios.
I used to always be

All right or all wrong.
But now I satisfy myself
With being mostly right
Relative to being less wrong.

You used to be able to read the fear
Of being wrong
In my eyes or worse
Indefensibly right.

But ever since my warranty gave out
I've been much easier
To live with.
White, made in Indiana

Assembled in 1951.
In the future
There may come a day
When I will replace this pot

But for now
I am ominously content
To capitulate to the spell
Of my pseudo-innocence.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.