It was like when you breathe
snow in your lung, gasping
into that ****** plastic mask,
hooked to the machine the
doctors sent home with me,
feeding it the foaming medicine
that was supposed to free me.

One doctor let me listen to my
own chest with his stethoscope,
& I heard a landscape of old
paper, parading. That's you,
he said, that's you.

Another time I sat and watched
as they pierced my hand for
blood, to find how much oxygen
my lung was passing on. That
doctor taped the needle down,
apologized, We don't get many
kids, he said as my blood
wandered into another machine,
& my lung smothering in its cage.

I grew out of it, eventually.
I hit eighteen, could run
without hissing, without pain.  
The long nights under the blanket,
struggling for breath, I forgot all
about them as I discovered *****.
But I never quite forgot that feeling
of being at war with your own body,
trying to pacify it, trying to beat it
back, trying to trick it, trying to
drown it out like dead television.
What's yours is never wholly yours.