Hypochondria
for Dr. Gregor Bruggemann

It only goes away
when you look for it.
It’s dark in there; it ducks
behind the drapery –
a bee buzzing from one ear into the other,
a covert pollination.

It’s made an industry of me,
a textbook of haphazard symptoms.
One day it settles on a site,
the next it pulls up stakes -
a drudge at its dull routine,
the insomniac who wrecks my sleep.

A long time it’s been mushrooming.
I feel it there
and here
and when I limp, it switches!

Suspicion is the seed of proof;
the body knows what it knows -
six months, a year, and then we’ll see.
So let me say I told you so
since I won’t
when the thing I’m dying of
finally kills me.

Sarah Sloat

If you've any comments on this poem, Sarah Sloat would be pleased to hear from you.