What, Me?
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
–Lily Tomlin
When we’re in a car together I worry we’ll die and the world will lose its role models.
Forget flying somewhere for the same vacation, I worry.
During hurricanes I ache with precognition: our souls, linked trapeze artists, our Fossil watches dangling in the continuum, our anti-gravitational loose change rising.
I worry about dreams where we create a motorcycle gang. We’re always akimbo, but I worry.
There’s destiny in our future. I can’t help but worry we’re somehow sinking, even sunk—in the midst of all this (frippery), we’re headed for a kind of disguised cliff.
When one of us shines, I have the urge to yank the shiny one to the side of the stage.
I worry someone will see the light and shoot at it.
When I worry, I worry I am wasting supposed time, or that if there is a being of some unimaginably sentient proportion with a lovely plan, I am a little idiot.
Most of the time I am too worried to worry about the repercussions of worry, however.
There is someone laughing out on the sidewalk and there is someone laughing in the next room. In the middle of this stereo of laughing, I worry about essentialism.
I worry about words: spate and landlocked and Lincoln, words I’ve distilled right out of this poem in an effort to preserve essence.
I worry that you will not move to my state and I will not move to your state and that our states will suffer irreparable worry on our behalf.
Worry is a darkroom where negatives are developed, they say, and I am a photograph awash in black water.
