The Arkansas Fluke

I ate the wrong crawfish on my first float trip.  It really wasn’t wrong, but eating it raw sure was.  A specialized blood test found a lung fluke eating me from the inside out.  I didn’t like this because women don’t generally like men with parasites in their lungs.  I was scared that I’d have this fluke in my lungs for twenty years.  Then a secondary infection led to the removal of fifty percent of my left lung.  After six weeks I went home, I was feeling like myself.  Now I drive a pick-up.  I like that, it looks pretty. 

“My first poem was a bolt from the blue… it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence… it filled me with soul satisfying joy.”

— William Carlos Williams