as vacation approaches

I need a tune-up

as vacation approaches
there’s both a flurry of finishing-up what I’m bound to do
and an increasing release from the harnesses
to which I yoke my energies,

as the doing less defines me,
anxiousness after anxiousness starts to bubble up,
as worries I’ve denied, while doing,
surface like bubbles on a pond,
and I have to deal with varying degrees of the noxious as they burst,

it is a good time to take stock
and clean out the effects of the neglect that has had to be
while I have dealt moment-to-moment,
day-to-day, with what has needed doing.

by Henry H. Walker
June 17, ’11