In my previous post “A Poem for Your Thoughts: Experiment 1: Stress,” I posed this question: If stress were tangible, would it be a person, animal, plant or object?  One of the first images I came up with was a dog biting your pant leg.  My dog liked to do that a lot, it was adorable.  But it was also a little annoying, especially when you had things to do.  Anyhow, when I decided to write a villanelle piece to describe stress, this image didn’t quite fit in because it was too cute.  I created a new poem just for this.

Living with Stress

Stress follows me around
like a puppy dog
biting my pant leg.
He chases after me, watches me,
glares at me, snarls at me.
He tugs and pulls,
but he never lets go.

I push him and shove him,
shake my leg, shake my fist
tell him “shoo” to no ado.
He only barks and whines.
This damn stray
won’t go away.

He follows me
from the house to the car,
from the car to the office,
here, there, everywhere,
I drag him by the pant leg,
he just won’t let go,
slowing me down
from chasing dreams
and buttery happiness.

Tired and annoyed,
I take a breath, lean down
to pet him, love him,
pick him up and hug him,
set him down to play.
It’s okay.
Stress is now happy,
Stress will go away
and come biting back
another day.