The Plague

It wasn’t the soft betrayal of a trying

afternoon that changed me,

but the crawl.

The slick, unholy hush

of frogs in my thoughts.

Plaguing my head.

I was sick,

not metaphor-sick, not soul-searching sick

but body-decaying—

flesh in revolt, spirit in exile.

Each fiber sang a different hymn of ache,

and still, they came.

Frogs in the sink.

Frogs in my bed.

Frogs in the seams of my walls.

Their croaks pulsed.

Their eyes, knowing.

Their silence, scripture.

I prayed

half out of habit, half out of fear.

Said something desperate

into the bath steam and mildew

behind the bubbled paint

and they answered—not with healing,

but with vision.

Clarity doesn’t arrive

in clean white rooms.

It slithers in disguise of amphibians.

It hops over your shame.

It sits on your chest

until you name what you were really dying of.

And I saw. Saw all of it.

All the vain glory I once called joy.

Saw myself spitting out frogs

like truths I had swallowed.

Now I walk different.

Not cured, but somewhat morphed and

awake.

The plague didn’t leave til I learned

to sit with my frogs.