"Let
me
be that
I am and
seek not to alter
me" –William Shakespeare
—from Much Ado About Nothing
Once
upon
a time not
long ago, there lived
a veteran who shook and shook.
The V.A. doctors used words like idiopathic
and psychogenic and we-dunno-ic, but the veteran escaped the waiting room's
dungeon and ran back to his village where a demon appeared, another one, a new form, ready to
terrorize the veteran's hometown,
so the veteran hugged the demon, held, his skin earthquaking, rattling the demon into
nothingness, the disease of his body too much for the demon that it deconstructed down
into emptiness. There was no princess.
There was only the shaking. So the veteran married his shaking. When he said the words I do
to himself, the chapel began to shake and
shake, crumbling to the ground, burying the veteran alive. He did not die. He just
became one with the ground. He would just lie there, waiting
until it became too much to
bear, body raging,
as those up
above
rest.
