Poem : The Dead Horse

He is my greatest fault
My enemy
But is he?
I beat him then resurrect him
Like Lazarus
Then beat him to death again, and again
But don’t mistake my words
I am no God
I am just a man beating a dead horse
Or so the saying goes
But sometimes
My dead horse will convince me that beating him
Is not my fault at all
That he is not my enemy
That I’m only crossing my T’s and doting my I’s and such
That it’s become second nature to me
To check, double check, and check once more
My dead horse tells me it’s from my up bringing
That my father use to beat his father to death as well
Oh how I wish I could stop and sometimes I do
Sometimes the anxiety that lives within me quiets for a while
And I can put down my stick
And the dead horse is safe to graze for a day
Or maybe a week
Maybe a month
Then something happens to awaken that demon
The demon of anxious what ifs
The demon who steals my breath with his pitchfork of asthma
Makes my insecurities grow with speed
But now I think
The dead horse might be on to something
Beating him came about from protection you see
He’s kept me safe with routine
With checking twice then doing once
Without mistakes
All was taught to me by my father
My mother
Both were Depressionary children
And beating a dead horse kept them in sync with staying alive
At a time when mistakes might have meant the loss of a meal
The loss of a job that could have been worked
When you’ve experience hunger to the point of
Cooking the seed for the next years crop to feed your kids
Or eating half eaten apple cores you’ve found on the ground
Then you will defiantly beat the dead horse for comfort
Like they did
And you will pass this way of beating onto your children like me
To continue and ponder in the form of this poem
And conclude it’s just the way I am