Soul Chiggers

June 3

Soul Chiggers

If you can seed apprehension deeply in a generation, you can reap disillusionment for a hundred years. Bent foresight twists hindsight. Admiring ignorance, signs death’s warrant. Evil splintered to a thousand slivers burrows under the skin without killing their host. Death delayed spreads destruction along with melancholy; a septic contagion if ever there was one. And how do we fight this systemic blight? It is embedded in the water, the air, the mind, and try what I might; I can’t seem to live without any of these. Chiggers of the soul feed and breed no matter how I scratch and chew. I am raw, but still infested. How do I kill what is in me without killing the me?

Step up to indecision

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THE WORM

Because there is never enough punishment

For those who inflict pain, I punish myself

Only I can tell if the depth of the pain is a match

Only I can judge when enough is enough.

This is the turn of the drunken worm--

Who lives in my brain

The belief that what began in pain

Must end there too.

Even now in recovery I persist in hurting myself

In a thousand tiny ways, setting trap after trap,

To catch the perpetrators, making my heart a mine field

A place unfit for me to live

I must sober the worm

And let myself off the hook.