Once, I felt a virus

gnawing on a nerve

within the folds of my brain.

To look for an answer,

I told Everyone a story.

They said, "this is sickness."

I was drugged

while it continued to devour.



I walked over a muddy field, then a greener pasture

under the warm, strange blanket of night,

to find a different story;

stayed until I found writing in the sun-streaked sky,

too bright for me to read;

looked down on millions of green globs

decomposing on grass,

and a sandaled foot, probing one with its toe.



My eyes trailed up to the foot-owner’s face.

“That’s mine,” he explained.

“How did you get rid of it?” I asked.

He pointed to the sky –

“Just read it.”



“They’ll tell you the cure,” they said, “but it is a demise.”



I screamed at his figure as it faded away into the horizon,

only to find that my voice was one in a sea

(But they sounded sick, too;

I didn’t try to find them).



She came up to me like a rising sun,

and told me not to be so sullen.

The words came out of lips,

I noticed, colored like fire trucks.

Her eyes performed a somber ballet

when I winced from the ceaseless gnawing.

She picked off one of the globs from the grass,

fondly and distantly,

and stared in the direction of the too-bright script.

“You’re too scared to look, because of the story,” she said.



You were telling the story that Everyone told you.



“It’s normal, though.”

Liquid wisped away from my ears,

my relieved brain,

and idle fingers touched another’s

when I finally read the writing:

you’re the cure.