Day Twenty-Five: "A Penny for Your Thoughts"

A Penny for Your Thoughts

and surely the phrase came first,
idly flipped until the what if
it was more than figurative entered
the writer’s mind, and so we see
this timid office worker who buys
a newspaper and accidentally
pays with a coin that lands
on its edge, and this miracle
of probability grants him (somehow)
the ability to read minds. Most
insanely of all, the lesson learned
here is not one of human evil,
at least not entirely, but rather
the way we don’t do what we think,
the unreliability of mind as narrator.
And so, when these magical powers
are mysteriously revoked, we find
an uncommonly lucky, happy man
at the end of the story, he and we
the wiser for our small investment.