A Fine Diet
There is the winter I fall from the bannister
two flights. I break all my ribs except two,
puncture my little sack of lung, and crack a single
vertebra that feels like a hot pink souvenir shot glass
shattering sex on the beach into my neck.
All this to taste blood in my blood
and sand before they take me away.
After the gurney's float, the paramedics steal
my Christmas money and an Applebee's gift card
en route to the fancy-shmancy hospital.
When true stories are super true, we forget
thinking of them as metaphors. I'd call this
a wild time. This implies something natural.
They say things about enough drugs
to kill a small horse, but I was the medium
-size elephant boogying in the living room
having a pretty nice time. I'm never mean.
Machines beep their foreign cues and
I suck on ice chips. I ask for a splash
of a sazerac but the nurse hears sandarac.
He presses a button, he plops an evergreen
in my fertile styrofoam cup. Before it takes,
I call Jason's girlfriend a polar bear. Whoops.
Jason breaks my tooth on the assumption
that this was degrading, logically. Like a cop
as pig or lothario as dog. She smiles with seal's
blood in a ring around her furry white mouth.
My eyes slam shut with the heft of two vaults.
In valuable sleep, I keep ordering corpse reviver #2s
until my dreams come metaphor. Lillet provides
an economic way to see France. Mezcal serves
as a type of morning herbal supplement. My body
slowly cooks itself at a healthy 98°F, but my destiny
is not to simmer, but rather rot.
Meanwhile, God burns in the sky as a garnish,
a charred lemon wheel adrift in a black punch.
Outside my clinical window, the river lobs
itself down gravity's rope. Choppy godlings sing
the chink and clink of its ordinary, savage ice.
I hum because I can never remember the words.
