An Insider's Guide on How to be Sick
Never say the words 'this is not my life'
This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the night
This pain that woke your lover, chased her to another room
To another life
This fevered fainting
This tremorring chest
This mangled kite
This panic like a cave of bats
This nurse drawing blood wearing doubled gloves
This insurance doesn't cover that
This hurried paycheck of doctor after doctor after doctor
This stethoscope that never hears your heart
This hospital bed
This florescent dark
This save your prescription with side effects worse than the disease
This please let me have one month where I read more poems than warning labels
This not knowing what the test will say
This pray pray pray
This airplane's medical emergency landing
This shame when you can't walk
Shame when you can't fuck
Shame when you're home alone sobbing on another friday night
Say 'This is my life
This is my precious life
This is how badly I want to live'
Say Sometimes you have to keep pulling yourself up by the whip
Take punch after punch to the face forward
To the head up
And still uncurl the fist of your grief like a warm blanket on the cool earth of your faith
Say every waiting room is the clime where you will finally take shape to fit into the keyhole of your own gritty heart
To open mercy
To open your siren throat
Say every fever is a love note to remind you that there better things to be than cool
Fuck cool
Fuck every pair of skinny jeans
From the month your muscles started atrophying to a size two
Say fuck you to anyone who asks you if you eat enough
Say how do you not know that is so fucking rude
Remember you never have an obligation to quiet the hurricane inside your chest
Especially on a day when another healthy person suggests 'you would feel so much better if you would just focus your breath into a Buddha beam of light"
Like that light is going to miraculously dissolve the knife that's been churning in your kidneys for the last six fucking months
Say Sunshine, please go back to your job at the aroma therapy aisle at Whole Foods and leave me alone
I know how to talk to God
And God does not expect me to use my inside voice
God knows how goddamn hard I am working to become a smooth stone
So I can skip on my back across this red red sea
So I can trust deep in my screaming bones
Everything is a lesson
Lesson #1 through infinity
You will never have a greater opportunity to learn to love your enemy than when your enemy is your own red blood
Truce is a word made of velvet
Truce is a word made of velvet
Wear it everywhere you go