Hesch Karma

The emaciated yin and obese yang of my life,
the painful imbalance of the bad almost always
immediately arriving to drown in mud
the alleged shiny new good,
has led to a numb stasis in which I hang
here and age like stinking cheese.
Why bother even trying for anything
beyond right here, right now?
Leaky gumboot in the swamp is just
the way it is. Even if I slog to dry land,
that eager helping hand extended to lift me
will inevitably be revealed to work
some slight-of-hand and flourish a flame-thrower.
It all falls under the mantle of what I’ve come
to call Hesch Karma—
a Newtonian law of metaphysics that says
for every good action that happens to me
there is an unequal and opposite reaction—
a bomb blast without bombast, just bad ass.
But these days I’m making some headway
extricating myself from the swamp.
See, I’m becoming a scofflaw on the run
from Newtonisms. The Karma cops
may come after me, but with this new map
I have of joyous escape routes,
they’ll never take me alive.
Still worry about those gators, though.

© 2012 Joseph Hesch