Disappointed that my body
has pushed through another night,
I flush with anger for harboring 
such desperate selfish longing 
for an end to this cycle 
of sleep and wake 
and sleep and wake
again. I live a poser’s life,
keep enthusiasm for living
a sword-arm’s length away.

It’s such a privileged life,
such a privilege to be alive
and yet want to die 
without moving a finger 
to further that desire,

a privilege to feel entitled
to an easy passage.

Once, years ago,

I took the steps — bought the pills,
bought the razor blades,
tried more than once to use them.

I learned from those attempts
that I am a coward when it comes
to getting what I want, or what
I claim to want —

for perhaps I don’t want to die at all?
There are those who tell me that,
who say that what I did not do
I did not do not from cowardice,
but through the body’s stone resistance to 
the fact of finality. Something
within held me back. Maybe 
that’s so, but I can’t shake off
another thought —

that the reason
I did not succeed
was not from fear of pain
or afterlife censure, but from
the suspicion that once I’d crossed
I’d find everything there
to be much the same as here,
and once I was on that side,
there would be no way out.

So instead I wake up daily
dimly disappointed that I have
done so yet again, ashamed at
my inaction and my lazy wish
to have it handed to me in my sleep,
embarrassed when I think of those
who fight each day not to pass,
jealous of those who die in their sleep;

now and then each day
I push myself to feel 
a modicum of hope
that tomorrow
I might rise and know
something of what it’s like 

to be glad you’re alive.

Such a great surprise to become unbodied,
to find myself hovering above my own grave
once my loved ones had wiped their tears
and the diggers had wiped their hands
and all had gone away; such a great surprise
to learn then how much I’d been run

by the belief that I was my body, how many
wounds and acts of ill repute I might have avoided
if I had become aware earlier of my body only
as game piece and vehicle for what I truly was
and not fallen into its urgency and insistence
upon its own mechanical demands. Now
that I am no longer inside the creaky tyranny
of it, now that it is beneath me in the dirt,
only now can I see how free I could have been;

words like “walk” and “run” replaced 
by “float” and “seep” and “hover,”
words like “hunger” and “thirst” set aside,
words like “lust” and “flush” and “blush”
slipping from the vocabulary
of my still-conscious ghost until
all that is left is the mist of me

dampening the headstone at dawn,
darkening the rough granite,
my sodden name a remainder
and reminder
of what I once thought I was,
what I did not understand at all.

It might be the dawn
of the last day I’ll be alive,
or it might not. Grand apocalypse
or tiny personal demise;
I can’t say when either or both
may arrive.

I’ve read of 
many who have said,
“today’s the day,” then turned
their sick heads away
from loved ones
with a last resigned smile
and passed. Such
foreknowledge seems to come
only when that last day
is already very near,

and there are of course
the tales of soldiers diving into 
showers of demise who 
also predict such things, tales
of sailors on sinking ships
and pilots and passengers on 
falling planes, or in colliding
cars and trains, who do the same;

I cannot forget
to mention those
who choose, alone
in darkness, a path
hacked through dense pain
into that final peace
by their own hand.

All of these know
by choice or chance
what is coming,
but only just before
it arrives. I cannot see myself
slipping into despair
were I to somehow learn
the hour of my death
well before it came.
Instead, I like to think I’d fall
into the worldview
and mindset of a sloth —  

hanging for days and months,
perhaps for years,
from favorite places
in my personal canopy,
moving as little as possible,
being slow and sweet with a 
perpetual smile on my
changed and perfect final face,

dropping to the floor below
in one last fast moment
when it’s finally time
to go.