Figures

A laboratory will be looking at what runs inside me this week. My life-force will  be reduced to numbers and hummed and hahed over by scientists. Then grim-visaged doctors will pass sentence. Yet, in all their test-tubes and filters, they will not detect the enzyme that sings for joy when the birds come to eat crumbs from my window sill while I sit motionless with a mug of tea so as not to scare them off. There will be no metabolic panel informing of the atavistic foot-tapping on hearing a reel or a jig. Try as they might they can not tell me the composition of love.

You should eat less salt.

You should read more poems.

You should drink less.

You should sing more.

But my advice will delay your appointment at the grave.

And my advice will equip for what is after.

And so doctors in their white coats and black-clad preachers ping-pong away and the clock tick-tick-ticks.