Bad Medicine

The bottles are in the old oak cupboard
behind glass doors. You can read
the labels and today, you wonder at them,
how we could think that mix of ingredients,
strange things, half of them poisons,
could cure us. They seem as quaint
as they are dangerous,

not unlike so much you have taken yourself,
strange advice from people broken
as much as yourself, at times more so,
but you, so desperate for healing,
so in your delirium of emotions pain
unable to tell good medicine from bad
took it all until slowly, despite the bad medicines,
you healed.

About this poem

Anyone else get a passel of bad advice in the worst of times somewhere in your history?

And yet somehow, we survive.

Tom