Bad Medicine

I’ve heard the words.
I’ve seen the history unfold,
the history,
of what is really inside –
bad medicine
dressed in beautiful bottles
that were taken so seriously once
and now
are the things of jokes.

About this poem.

This weekend I stopped at an antique shop that had an amazing array of bottles. My faves were the ones that had medicine, like the swamp root bottle in the picture above.

Swamp Root! It’s the kind of thing we joke about, but at some point in time, we came to understand it was simply bad medicine. Life is full of bad medicine, bad advice, bad love. We take it seriously for a while. But eventually, most of us figure it out.

Tom