Revelation before the second cup

Blues playing on the stereo.
The bass riff hard at work,
an underlying order to chaotic guitars.
It is morning in the diner and the cook is dancing.
The room is smoky, mostly empty.
Your head too a bit smoky, uncertain,
in the midst of two wars, between
antibiotics and dark germs, between
depression and determination,
your fingers the arbiters, the warriors
in the day’s battle, digits of spirit,
filled with words your mind does not hear,
remembering the battles past,
won and lost, remembering the medicine,
the therapy, all tempered by faith
of things unseen, of things not believed,
until truth at least intruded and you learned
the value and limitations of daydreams,
the value and limitations of steel and armor
and backbones and gathering the final understanding
that even when it feels like the medicine
is worse than the disease, that feeling
is just another of the lies Satan
(or whatever you name your demon)
and so you take the pill. take the advice,
hear the sermon, do the work, expose the lies
because weak as it may feel in the moment,
It; you are good enough.
And that, that is the revelation,
all before the second cup of coffee.

About this poem

I’ve been sick. Taking the antibiotics, which work, but have all kinds of nasty side effects. Made me think of therapy, which should have a subtitle of “It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.” Truth in advertising. Not unlike a lot of things that are good for us, but through it all, we are, wherever we are in the journal, in the battle, enough. Pilgrims, not princes. That’s us.

Tom