Sometimes you’ve got things to worry about and other times you worry even when there’s nothing much to worry about. It doesn’t make much difference in the end. My advice: Stop worrying and write a poem.
Worry is a big black bird.
It spends its hours on a wire. Waiting.
And then at the slightest, merest, tiny hint and infinitesimal twitch, it swoops.
Flapping through the night and getting in the way
Of slumber. With its dead-thing breath and scratchy feet.
You can lie as still as you like, but it always hears a hammering heart under moon-splashed .candlewick.
You know it only takes one fretful fart. A question with no answer.
A single, sinking, sliding, scary slither of realisation.
Or a word. That’s it. A single word and you’re undone.
Let it echo in your mind and see it fix its dreadful gaze on you.
There. What was it this time?
Mortality?
Insanity?
Reality?
Futility?
Responsibility?
Inevitability?
Or something you can’t quite remember that you should have said yesterday?
It doesn’t care – the worry bird. You laid a trail and it’ll peck its way through your defences, through your hope and logic. All set to bury a big, brutal beak in your tenderest parts.
And even if all you can offer it is some free-floating anxiety and a cute little collywobble, by bleary breakfast you’ll have cold sweat and feathers with your heartburn.
The worry bird will see to that.