When you wake
It is sitting on the edge of your bed,
Waiting to be put on
Like yesterday’s clothes.
They are still too small.
The shirt chafes at your neck
And the pants pinch at your waist.
They shrink wrap themselves
To your joints,
Stiffening your gate,
Chaining your hands and feet,
Wrists and ankles
Knees and elbows.
It has enough electrical charge
To freeze an appendage
And force the involuntary utterances:
“Oh,”
“Ow,”
“God damn.”
It is small like electrons
Racing up neural pathways to the brain,
Always leaving damage in the synovial joints.
It is as wide as the sky
Filled with tumbling lightning,
Rolling and rolling through tangles of nerves.

It travels with you
To the bathroom.
Will your knees get you there in time?
Will your arms reach yourself
In the bath?
Will fingers hold out long enough
To rinse your hair?
To trim your beard?
To hold your toothbrush?
The warm water helps.

Eventually you must negotiate
The cold.
You towel off where you can reach,
Contort into real world clothes.
But one day you cannot sustain the defenses.
You let it pierce you
And you cry and stamp your feet
Like a six year old
Who keeps wetting the bed
And who wants his mama
To make it stop,
Only Mama is dead
And the pain doesn’t care.
It throbs with your pulse
In bones
And joints
And synovial tissues.
It pierces
Then overfloods.
It seeps out of your bones
And it flies in your hair
And sets your scalp on fire.
Your knees ache
But your shoulder pain is sharp.
Your elbow locks
When raw bones clash
Like broken gears in a worn out clock.
Your hip grates,
Grinding something down
That bleeds and erodes.
And you gnash teeth,
Gird loins
and you ignore it
And ignore it
And ignore it.

But eventually you understand:
It is not your pain.
You do not own it;
It owns you.
You are Pain’s bitch.
It is your possessive lover
And it hurts you where no other may touch.
It is intimate
When it electrifies your nerve gardens.
Its fingers pry and dig.
It seeps salty vinegar into open wounds.

So you and your lover
Face your day with new understandings.
It is a jealous lover
And you dread meeting new people
With firm handshakes.
You give up any intimacy with tools.
Hammers may as well be cattle prods.
Rakes and shovels become abstracts
Hanging on your garage wall.
Even books are too heavy for your wrists.
Instead you begin a new study of drugs.
Your days get measured out in pills:
The morning pills, not coffee.
The afternoon pills, not lunch,
Maybe some weed.
The evening pills.
And you offer more changes for your lover:
You drink less
Or you drink more,
Some drink a lot more.
Each day is measured in organ capacity.
Will too many pills kill your kidneys?
Some days you root for liver failure.
You begin to understand the Oxy crisis.

Finally, it is bedtime.
Your lover crawls in with you
Wrapping you up in
Child-sized flannel pajamas
On flannel sheets.
They grip in your crotch,
Pinch in your groin,
Squeeze your chest
And armpits.
Lying still hurts.
Turning over hurts.
No pillow fits your neck.
No quilt lies easy.
You curl, feeling close to Heaven,
Still outside the gates.
You lie there a long time.
Eventually gray light seeps through the window.
You see the figure on the side of the bed,

As ordinary as an old friend holding your old jacket still too small.

[87]