Bugger
Topic: Poetry
My head is crawling with bugs again.
It felt like something was caught in my hair just now,
I reached and shook a patch of curls, and felt the first
sluggish tickle of shockingly numerous legs.

Not real bugs. I know this.
This has happened every night for a week.
Checked and checked again for lice,
a fruitless search, I know, because this is symptomatic--
a common hallucination. I've been right here, in hellish d?j? vu,
the same mundane mental mis-firings, so bored with the predictability;
the smell of my orthodontist's hands, fruity and clean, soothing--
I wanted to stay in the chair, under those fragrant hands, so ephemeral.
And the bugs. Seventeen years, the damn bugs.

These insects feel heavier, more weighty than lice,
more spidery, slow like that, menacing.
Each leg strikes softly, and I count five spots of movement,
because I must count. The loop--the same loop in my head again.
Tonight, in bed, they'll multiply and move down to my body,
unseen, crawling, sprawling, trickling trails over my ears,
down my neck, dragging ghost trails to my ankles.
I will not sleep--again. I'll scratch, though they won't bite.
I've grown my nails again--a mistake.

This is not real;
no spiders hide in my hair.
I know it's a waiting game.
The sleeping pill I took an hour ago
doesn't register, except my body is bone-tired,
but my mind keeps going like the Great Wall of China,
disappearing in the distance, curving back and forth,
punctuated by lookout posts, the air of something discarded,
something lost that stays, something that ends...somewhere,
I'm sure.