Diagnosis

Sickness is a larva that burrows into the soil of the body
Emerges seventeen years later as a creaking cicada
Burdening the mind with its annoyance

Sickness is a leech stuck to the skin like cancer
A slug loaded and aimed to kill

Sickness is the silverfish
Elusive and hidden in dark corners

Sickness is the fire ant and a bite that stings
Resulting in the heat of worry

Sickness is a spider softening the drum of the ear
Builds her web of confusion back and forth within the mind,
Hanging her thread on the worn down rafters of nerves

Sickness is the mosquito that hovers out of arms reach
As you lay in sleepless heat, itching

Sickness is the boll weevil that gets into the cereal of your life
And causes you to lose your appetite

Sickness is the cockroach,
An armored scuttle of fear

Sickness is the invasive species of a parasite
Who settles into the lake of the heart
And contaminates all its tributaries

Sickness is the walking stick that is right before your eyes
Yet unseen

Sickness is the tick that hooks on
and will not let go

Sickness is the caterpillar’s cocoon
And the long waiting of something unknown

The Redwoods

“Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

Grandfather Time himself stood before me
Bearded evergreen and welcoming
The priest in this cathedral of history
The canopy a choir loft
The members of this congregation
A fraternal order of longevity
These sentinels of ancient creeds
Generals against gravity

To The Races

Today I will harness distraction
Tame her with sugar cubes and apples
She will carry this tired body
She will rest at night in the stable
And she will be named Present Tense

The American Dream

is a postcard—
a false, glossy reality;
our location airbrushed across the sky,
pressed from a woody pulp,
we convince ourselves of the memory
held fast to a thin card-stock existence.

O The Wonder Of A Bicycle

O the wonder of a bicycle—
the closest thing a child has to becoming a robin.
Taken off perch with a spring in the step,
how the perspective changes,
in the zigzag of peddling freedom,
as the neighbor boy sees him whisk by
and whispers in a covetous tone—
“Man, he was flying!”