How to Be Sick

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