Except for the dark eyes
Albino white
Hair like bleached silk
Robed all in white
Almost invisible
In the white room
Lit to cast no shadows
Seeming to float within it
The visitor disarmed and
A bit disoriented, on
The edge of vertigo
Knows there is a test
Before the question
They come to ask
A price to pay for prophecy
A test of intention, of truth
Death, the fate of failure
The oracle, the seer-es
Sheds the white robes
Advances naked like
Living marble Venus
The bite is quick
She tastes your soul
In that blood
Makes her judgment
To answer a question
Or drain you dry

Bob Wertzler is retired from almost twenty years in the mental health field in California and Arizona. There are times the title, “Recovering Therapist”, seems to fit. In 2006 he retired to move to Western North Carolina to help and become primary care giver for his father who had developed Dementia. Before all that, there was work at various times as a soldier (US Army 1967-70), community organizer, cab driver, welfare case worker, wooden toy maker, carpenter, warehouse worker, and other things. He relates to a line in a Grateful Dead song, “What a long, strange trip its been.”