Motion is medicine, you tell me by Alan Walowitz

Motion is medicine, you tell me

and other times you say, Medicine is motion,
and when I fail to apply the commutative property
and switch it back around,
you tell me I’m being difficult
which I’m known to be
when I don’t really give a shit,
and forget the Prime Directive:
In marriage, it’s best to go along to get along.

It also shows that day to day, Yeats was wrong:
things don’t fall apart;
they just get confused and eventually misshapen
till you can’t figure which end is up,
or what’s the subject of the sentence,
or even which of the seven classic disciplines we ought to apply
that would bring meaning to a challenging concept.
This could explain Brexit, or the National Front in France
—Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, my ass–
or Pres. Trump’s one nation under God–Trust me, he says:
we’ll have the very best One;
or the existence of the God particle
which sounds so promising
that something—anything—might be holding us together.

I’ve learned reading Physics for Dummies
that a body in motion tends to stay in motion,
though I’ve noticed it’s plenty easy
these days to tumble into an easy chair and fall fast asleep
with hardly a moment’s notice, even with all the bad news
on loud and in a continuous loop.
It was said Dali, himself, preferred to nap with a tin on his head.
When it would fall and crash like cymbals on the hardwood floor
he would wake to the alarm, now rested,
wax his moustache again, and get back to work.
I guess, given current conditions,
we’d be wise to forego our next nap,
and get our asses back in gear.

by Alan Walowitz, first published in Verse-Virtual.

Editor’s Note: This rambling poem circles around the inevitable pain of living—nothing is ever what you think it is, and once you figure it out, it changes. There’s nothing to do except keep going.