Sick

 Sanity is hard to find

“As sick as sick can be,” my friend tells me in the car

“The moment I get close, I can see how weird they are.”

We re-read my mother’s letter about how hard to be

the seventh child, with older sisters’ ballroom celebrity

As her eldest daughter, she tells me I “don’t deserve” a bar

A friend remembers one beau—smacking of normality

telling her that aliens like couch radioactivity

He was seriously married with kids and sticky-lolly jar

As sick as sick can be

We tell each other, to care-fully know, we must watch afar

for blamers, shamers, false love-claimers greeting on the tar

We look for listeners and real smiles—as selectivity

But still fall for our fathers—badly-wired electricity

Begin again, we grin again, re-cast our own blown star

As sick as sick can be

And doing things alone do I feel more authenticity?

Or do I swim congenitally, wearing neck-to-knee?

I shiver under bedclothes but leave the door ajar

As sick as sick can be

He does not think that half-and-half is to cook and char

I recognize some jiggly-bits but not the whole ha ha

Mirror-dancing, “You’re my baby”, looking back at me

At least I know that I am crazy, unlike most humanity

As sick as sick can be