An Old Danish Goat

He imagines
his anxiety is a bear trap,
a set of steel jaws clamped tight
around his leg like
grown children still not grown
too old for joy.

But, once upon a time,
somebody told him that
anxiety is a goat.
And that makes sense, too,
to think of it as
a wee hungry beastie
that will eat anything
you feed into its
ravenous maw.

And yet, there is also this to consider:
his mother once said, “Anxiety is
the dizziness of freedom,”
and when he thinks of that
he thinks of when it’s the worst,
which is when he’s like Grover
trying to nail one page to the next
so that he will not get any closer
to the monster at the end of the book.