On Friday, Oakland decided it was high time to initiate me and someone smashed the window of my rental vehicle and stole my backpack.

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I shouldn’t have left the backpack just sitting on the backseat, begging someone to steal it. This happened during the day, in a very busy parking lot. I wasn’t hurt and all of the things stolen are easily replaced so in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that bad. Still, I spent most of the day dealing with it – filing a police report, filing an insurance claim, dealing with the rental car place, getting a new rental, etc.

My backpack contained my workout clothes, a wifi hotspot I had just activated the day before, and my kindle. Of all the items in my bag, I’m most upset about losing my  kindle. I am a voracious reader, plowing through 2-3 books per week. I was 90% done with my current book and was looking forward to finishing it Friday night. After it was stolen I called Amazon and de-registered it and they also added a note on my kindle so if anyone tries to link it they’ll be unable to – not that I really expect them to, someone who smashes a window doesn’t strike me as a reader.

And since I never waste an opportunity to write a poem, I wrote one about the incident. I mean, any time you get robbed you should write a poem about it – right? What else would you expect from me?

Glittering Like Diamonds

I was caught unaware,

I stood open-mouthed and staring,

the glass of my window shattered, the pieces

littering the pavement, glittering like diamonds.

I took a quick inventory, realized

the most precious

item missing was my kindle – 

a trivial loss in the grand scheme,

but for a bibliophile it was a sucker-punch

that left me shocked, then angry, then sad.

No thief is going to enjoy a kindle

the way I do. As I brushed the bits of glass

from the seat I thought of the book I was nearly finished reading,

I wondered about the end.