Cognitive Fireflies

by Daril Bentley

For Heidi

Image credit: Tony Phanon Unsplash

There is

art                    volleyball

tests

          failed          tests

camping          passed        texting

   all around

through            over                                         beyond

                           within

her

attention

deficit.

She is brilliant

and perfectly

functional

when she can block out

the prepositional

constant

distraction

phrase

of sixty thousand fireflies

in her

head.

Good kid.

Doesn’t deserve this.

Kellogg’s.             

PepsiCo.     General

Mills.

Money 

money

(we’re onto the science

and the capitalist profit

angles)      money  money

                    bugs.

You ask,

How is it

going?

Pretty much

as usual.

Too tired for

anything more than

a cliché

in reply.

It means

she can’t begin

to see in the dark

in the basement

of her brain

to change

the burned-out

fuse

or flip

the switch

that has tripped.

We ancient ones and her parents will not

let her

contemplate

cutting

or suicide.

We tell her many

the world over

have a tougher

ride.

But it just sounds like

a platitude

we indulge in, written

in Sanskrit.

***

Daril Bentley

Editor and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee Daril Bentley is the author of several honored books of poetry as well as the reference The Bentley Guide to Poets & Poetry in English. He has published poems widely in noted poetry journals in the U.S., Canada, UK, Ireland, and India and has been a Yale Series of Younger Poets Award semifinalist, a New Mexico Book Award for Poetry runner-up, and honorable mention recipient in the Writer's Digest International Book Award for Self- published Poetry. He is founder of a poetry editorial service, a poetry reading series, and a poetry outreach program locally. He makes his home in Elmira, along the Chemung River in southern-central New York State.