What it is

June 2010: In a desperate attempt to stave off senility, the monkey began writing a poem a day. By summer's end he'd begun to run out of versified political rants and philosophical bloviations. Then he hit on the improbable idea of writing micro fiction in the form of Elizabethan sonnets. Eureka. The birth of the "Sonnets From Other Lives" series. Two hundred plus lives later, he's still at it.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

7/22

on shingles

an ill-named malady--it
lacks the fearsome respect
of an -osis or an -itis

physicians ask me to quantify the pain--
to rate it on a scale of one to ten
and after assigning agony a score
to describe it with an apter metaphor...

you know how when somebody stabs you in the back with a butcher knife?
& then comes back every few minutes and gives the handle a good whack?
or
...how the invisible dwarfs who live under your skin all open up on your
nerve endings with their flame throwers?
or
...when a pack of starving wolverines launch a feeding frenzy
on your armpit?

it's kinda like that

so be so kind as to suppress your smile
& urge to ask me
cedar? asphalt? tile?
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1 comment:

  1. P. A .HofmannAugust 16, 2010 at 4:50 PM

    You can't win with this disease: Herpes (eeew) Zostar (sounds like the bad guy in a '30s Flash Gordon episode) or Shingles (which makes NO sense--where the hell did that come from?)

    ReplyDelete

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