BELLYACHE

It is travelling with me on the train,
flash after flash of landscape,
it’s like that, tummy protesting
for some excess, too much breakfast maybe
and the unavoidable stress.
In contrast with the great
neat, first sunlight of the day, entering
with a fiery stripe on my seat
like an immediate present from the sky;
and out of the window the blooming countryside,
the pure setting for a yogi
quiet and alert in his mind and body,
a bellyache the farthest thing
from his spotless breathing.

Or why not the opposite,
he would breathe with equanimity
all that might come to pass,
my pain at sunrise and the running grass.


This in order to renew my dialogue with David King and, in his latest post, his poem "The Bug in my Gut,"