My age’s lately been 
a stone tied to my foot.
Waking up daily feels more and more
like I’m standing poolside,
bound in weights, afraid to jump in. 

I’ve got
a tremor in my leg
that might be more of 
the sugary damage my feet
are already feeling.  I’ve got
lungs like sponges and 
honestly, I’m damn tired of
all of it.

That old devil
suicidal ideation — it almost 
sings, doesn’t it? 
“Sue is idle?” Tell her to get back
to work then! It’s a song of sorts.
Makes me want to yank my larynx
to keep from singing it.

You think that’s extreme?
It’s extreme, alright. Extremely
hilarious in the face of doom.
It makes me laugh
as I’m hovering over
a recreational drowning.

My leg keeps vibrating
and I could despair over
the progression of the disease
all day long, but then

who would do the dishes? Who
would do anything around here
if I let myself die early rather than
on time, naturally at the end
of all this decay?

I step away
from the pool, laughing. Plan
to keep making ridiculous music
as long as I can, no matter how heavy
my steps become.

Take the Grand Canyon, for instance.
It swallows your head. It breaks
your dimensions apart. If
you’re on the edge of it and
you toss a stone here
it may travel over a mile 
before it stops. Where else can you 
say such a thing —

except perhaps when 
anchored above the Mariana Trench?
A stone dropped over a ship’s rail there
can travel seven miles straight down
with no effort on your part
other than whatever it took
to get there in the first place.

Get to the right place 

and if you just let go,
you can watch it fall away
as far as it’s possible
for a burden to go.

Skip climbing.  Everest
is only five miles high and
it’s not strictly, purely vertical.
You feel stuck? You feel low?
Here’s the totality of what I know:

the depths can offer 
all you need. If you’re
already there, let go.

A closed eye, shut tight
by choice, fallen
comatose or dead,
having willed itself blind
or having shifted suddenly,
involuntarily, into
darkness.

A hand gone limp,
crossed over another like it,
resting on a chest
which may or may not 
be moving up, down,
slightly.

A body, small enough
to be overlooked if one
were to walk by in a hurry,
lying covered in dry leaves
by a main street but in a stretch
where there are few homes
and few who walk by.

How I know
this is my hometown:

I reach gingerly down
to the body and touch it,
almost tenderly, and when it
stirs and raises its head,
I look closely into the face
and say,

“Hey. Joe. Getting 
cold out here. Go home.
You need a ride or something?
I can go get the car.”

How, when this improbably
happens for the second time in 
my life, I know I have come
very far from home:

I reach into my pocket
and pull a phone from it
and call the emergency number
and stand to one side
and wait there for someone to come
and raise the body up and 
see how the person is,

and never get close enough
to see for myself, 
to touch, to feel.

My flaws
are built in.
They refract —
might distort
what’s inside
but also might
throw rainbows
at your eyes.

My mistakes,
add-ons all,
cover the facets.
They obscure, they
block. They will
make you think
of shadows and
you will start thinking
of what may lurk
in here.  

I’ve had 
the flaws
from inception.
You will
have to get 
used to them.
The mistakes 
I took on, 
were all my own.
Some of them
might wipe off. 
Others left hard stains.
I’m sorry for those.

I promise you
in the right light
I’m still brilliant,
though I admit it’s often
too hard to look
for that, even for me,

so if you turn away
I will be
at peace with you
and your choice,
though I will never
get there myself.

Remember that
crucifixion only became theology 
with time.  Once it was
just somebody’s job and 
somebody else’s brutal
entertainment; some
avoided such spectacle as that
due to delicacy and others ran
like hell to avoid being the targets
of the ones with the hammers and 
the nails.  Remember that
it only became holy
with time; some say it took
as little as three days,
others say it’s still not all the way
there. Remember
that it was cleaned up and
that you’ll really never know
what it was really like; remember that
the next time you’re looking up at
the bare cross on the wall of your church.
Remember that there are some places in the world
where on Good Friday
some try to replicate it,
dragging crosses 
through the dirt streets,
hanging themselves bloody
to bring it home again; remember
how you knew of them, the penitentes,
once upon a time and had forgotten them
till now? Remember how it sobered you
up to learn of them? To learn of people
who preferred to recall it was once
routine and mundane and bloody
and vile, and maybe it should have stayed
that way; if it one day makes you uneasy
in church, if it pulls you down to your knees
in sick wonder, maybe that’s what you get
for forgetting that it did not start
in purity and that they only capitalized it
once they made it into capital.