Mostly in the Afternoon

Shoulder and Neck, Leonardo Da Vinci

So they passed the bill.  Health care in 2014. I may manage to have insurance that long–or not–. What would really excite me is someone coming up with a cure for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or chronic yeast infections. Or depression…

(No, really, I’m very pleased. Thanks, Barack.)

Charles was here for 6 days and I greatly enjoyed his visit; we felt more comfortable together than we have in years. And toward the end, I felt the whisper of what was always there, what made me fear he wasn’t the right one, a crack in the rock, loneliness. I know now it would be there with Philip or anyone else. Philip is easier to be with, in some ways, because I always feel like I’m in a story with him, no matter how real and truthful I try to be, and he is; there’s something fictional about it all, which is not to say false…we fit like characters written by an author not entirely implausible, while Charles and are are simply children of The Great Spirit, The Great Blind Worm, or the great nothing. Which is its own story.

OK, TV on. They all seem to be having fun. Who brings the cupcakes to these things? Dennis Kucinich’s wife?

Robert Gibbs twittering from the White House…

Southern Republican shouting “Baby killer” at Bart Stupak…whose speech made me think of rows and rows of the unborn in doctor’s offices, floating in their little portable tanks (the mechanical wombs of the future), waiting to ask, “Where are my toes? Will I be blond? Why do knives cut? Flesh bruise? Who agreed to pain?”

Waiting for the President. I’d like to be a speechwriter-bird sitting on his shoulder, adding my little nuggets…

Large Intestine

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.

Here is my naked body.

Apparently you like it,

I have no reason to.

Who bound us, me and my body?

Why must I die

together with it?

I have the right to know where the borderline

between us is drawn.

Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?

In the hollow of the sex? In a toe?

Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.

Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right

to see myself. Don’t laugh.

That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made

my body.

I wear the used rags of my family,

an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair

after my grandmother, the nose

glued together from a few dead noses.

What do I have in common with all that?

What do I have in common with you, who like

my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely

I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,

my knee and you.

Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body

to play with.

And I will go.

There is no place for me here,

in this blind darkness waiting for

corruption.

I will run out, I will race

away from myself.

I will look for myself

running

like crazy

till my last breath.

One must hurry

before death comes. For by then

like a dog jerked by its chain

I will have to return

into this stridently suffering body.

To go through the last

most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,

slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure

or the gangrene of the large intestine.

And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,

reduced as it is

to a kidney failure

and the gangrene of the large intestine.

–Anna Swir