The Worrying

Thinking you know what you mean

Such a subtle trap

Words have lives

They are born, they work, and they die

Children imitate their parents

You know what I mean

I slap the same old syllables into the same old sequence

You nod and carry on

Reassured, reclining into the warm arms of familiarity

Wait

What did the gentle gerund "worrying" mean to begin with?

When it was newly minted, fresh and unfamiliar

What spicy semantic payload did this set of symbols

Uttered by some mouth, audited by some ear

Or scrawled by some shaking hand onto parchment or vellum

For the consideration of some old, dim eye

Deliver to the auditing or reading mind?

Strangulation

That was what it conjured

Putting your own fingers around your vulnerable throat

Squeezing with earnest energy

Using the flexible flesh and bone of your own body

To close the gasping tube that lets the postponement of death

Obstinately persist for another moment, or hour, or day

Names are costumes

Stitched for the living by the dead

We do this voluntarily

We strangle our present

With the hands of was and will be

We let the bubbling froth of has beens and might bes

Drown the static fleck of is

Masochism mixed with pessimism

Drunk with thirsty gusto

Numbered, days are spent counting

All of the worst ways they will be spent

Most of the monsters we make in our minds

Remain there, impotent, imprisoned in imagination

Barred by time and metaphysics

Save when we set them free to choke us senseless

Busily contaminating clean hours with dirty dread

No one can calculate the means of causing you distress

With the same cunning precision that you can

Torture is something we learn to inflict

By studying how stylishly we inflict it upon ourselves

You're an expert in this field, just like me

Braiding ifs and thens to make our own noose

Wait

Feel the sun on your face in the warm clearing of the present

The hand of the past, wrinkled and spotted, closes around it

Even as the hand of the future, sleek and pristine, does the same

But the present is clear, clean, pink and open

It wants only to respirate, to be long enough to keep itself

Coughing obstructions, sucking air

How real are those closing hands?

One is the menacing manual manifestation of memory

The other is the shadowy shaker of sweaty speculation

Both are phantom limbs we conjured

Only as real as fiction

With which we choke ourselves

This is as common as a cold

Is there a remedy?

What if we make a stage of the present

Where was and could be enjoy colloquy

Mutually edifying, this discussion

Could permit the past to tutor the future

And the future prudently to study the past

Both could be supervised, and studied, by right now

All three could learn a great deal

Get to know one another

Keep their fucking hands to themselves

And permit the only one who can do so

The living now, at last

To breathe