Boney

Oh death, everybody hates you,

Sang Nico Mbarga nicely,

In the almost universal

Habit of personifying death,

Death as a human character

Possessed of a human figure,

However made gloomy, monstrous,

Bony, spooky—god with a job,

Never the top god, few temples,

Old death. Mbarga even makes

You feel a bit of sympathy

For this ostracized character—

If you’re a person it’s no fun

To be disliked by everyone.

You would consider it unfair,

As the ender of suffering,

The bringer of peace and quiet,

Returner of life to being,

To be universally loathed

When in life so many persons

And personifications bring

More misery even than you—

Torture, chronic illness, famine,

Imprisonment—to name a few.

If you ask people, they hate death

For promising to dissolve them,

But death’s true cruelty is grief,

More pain given to the living.

The Popsicle Won’t Last

If you can just stick it out,
All this humiliation,
Maybe you’ll live long enough

You can be proud of yourself,
And your tall tale of tall tales
That made you exceptional

In your own weird way, again.
You doze. The electric-blue
Raspberry popsicle melts

On the counter beside you.
Stories are better about
Other people, since so few

People combine a tall tale
With an admirable truth.

Make It Stop

Bloody vomit, bloody stools,
Aches corkscrewing the torso—

If the ongoing cycles
Of relentless physical

Discomfort and suffering
Have anything in common

With the corrosive traumas
Internalized as heartbreak

And grief, it’s the marathon
Aspect, the marathon after

The marathon, the forced march,
On and on. It keeps going

Past all usefulness for pain
Past all pleas to make its stop.

Betrüger

Gold light on dirt, best useless alchemy—
Once the spice trade became mass production,
The prices fell. If gold could be produced

Reliably from lead it would become
A cheaper and cheaper commodity.
Flood the world with anything valuable,

And the value crashes. But the worthless,
Like the transformation of the evening
Light on dirt that was dirt and that stays dirt,

Can’t crash in value, whether it converts
To the possibly more worthless shadows
Or just stays as is, warm golden grounding.

Disability Four

Don’t get out of bed right now.
Pretend you can make the world
Come to you, bring what you need,

Pretend you can live at ease,
Metamorph in a pupa,
All the hard work to get here

Done, all the future trouble
Flying around, forgotten.
Let your parasite dine out

Inside your living substance.
At least you won’t have to go
Out to navigate the world.

All the language eating you
Will have all the work to do.

Disability Three

You look more normal in a chair,
The dimensions aren’t prestige,
And yet, when you sit, you look human,

You could be anyone
In a chair. And so you sit,
Rocking, slowly, back and forth,

Around, anticipating
But delaying getting up
On crutches catching crooked stares.

Disability Two

You have a collection
Of ugly devices
Invented to help you.

There’s the grabber you use
To reach things your hands can’t.
There’s the hard sleeve with strings

Used for pulling on socks
Over faraway feet.
There’s the strap like a leash

With no dog in it, good
For hauling legs in bed.
And there’s the wooden stick

With two white wire fingers
And a small hook—not sure
About the point of this.

Disability One

The occupational therapist

Realized there was no way you could

Lace up your right boot. I’ll be right back,

She said, returning with white laces.

These you only have to lace up once,

And then the elastic holds the knot.

Your left shoe kept its plain black laces.

You were discharged from the hospital

And, for nine months, couldn’t be bothered

To change the white elastic laces,

Going everywhere, one boot laced black,

One boot laced white. Couldn’t be bothered.

When the white lace broke, you replaced it

At last, with an elastic black lace,

A matching lace for the other shoe.

Nodding Away

You’re too sleep-deprived
To arrange these lines—

Every time you think
You’ve composed a phrase,

Your head snaps back up
From whatever dream

You’d been sliding in
Without noticing,

Like someone drowning,
If someone could drown

With so little fight,
By gradual slips,

Under the surface,
Up suddenly, back down,

Which is every day,
In a way, of life.