Options are crippling as chronic diseases,
weakening resolve, eating away the marrow of confidence.
What choice to make? What medication to take?

To swallow the pill of regret would be foolish,
To take the injection of shame would be folly.
How to decide which career? What diet? What friend group? Golly!

Don’t offer kisses on New Year, or raise glasses to beginnings.
Terminal, such endings.
Where to go? What to do? Who to be?

2022 slips into 2023,
and uncertainty is slowly killing me.
It’s sickening, sickening, sickening.

Turning old with worry lines, hardly sleeping at night!
What treatment will cure this anxiety?
I’m ill with doubt, it’s swelling my throat, closing up my mouth

Through glasses of bubbly champagne,
and a dysfunctioning brain, I think
God help me, please.

Through a haze of ailment, head heavy with a virus,
a whisper from within cures my fretting sin:
“Just Breathe.”

Who am I going to be?
One breath at a time,
One breath at a time.

In, out.
In, out.
Peace.

Tomorrow will worry about itself, why should I borrow trouble?
Every choice made is tangled with joy and sorrow.
This is who I will be: a person of peace.