The Body’s Such a Subtle Mouse When Self’s a Wounded Lion

Understandably,

Decades can exhaust

Your patience for this

Mess of hauling bones

And flesh out of beds

To get back in them.

If you can’t live on

For love of living,

Live on like the mouse

Who slyly bargained

With that wroth lion

Whose rest it had wrecked,

My life is little

Worth, my death is less.