—explaining to my doctor why I don’t want medication
I know you view me as an anxious person,
a sour expansion of what’s considered
normal,
but if you give me medication,
I fear it could be my creative decimation.
Let me trust my emotions
because even in my nuttiest rooms,
I find safety in words. I satisfy wonder,
to alphabetize is to baptize and heal.
All through my day, I find happiness
in revising poems, imposing verse
on a world that reads gossip columns while the pulsing cosmos
spins towards every black hole, every bleak loch.
Yes, when I’m off course, any exit leads to anxiety—
watch me traveling the road with heartland vertigo,
but I don’t need to be less manic—
Miss Clean
I, Calmness.
So before you offer medication to create a fiction freedom,
allow me to move towards poetry to postdate worry.
No, Dr. Xanax, Dr. Looking-for-your-little-pad,
Let me get through this
without you.
Let me
echo poems
as with that
as with that
comes hope.