You know,
Sometimes i feel the echo
Of my former disease
Wonder why instead of living
I write silent poetry
Whisper my secrets
Into my books
Or speak, shaken
Stuttering breath to a stranger
On a plush chair
In a rented office space

I know one day
I'll no longer be here
By hand, by wandering feet
Or by happenstance
But that is not freedom
Only something similar
I can not be free
If i am not there
To live it

I tell anyone with ears
To listen to me
Listen to my mournful
Empty tales of
Empty life
But it can always get emptier
Distilled down into
A spectre merely mirroring
Making no memories
And spending all of my time
In such a daze
Laying the way sunshine hazes
Over a hot summer morning
Just falling asleep with its rise

That hollowed out feeling
In the throat and in the soul
Not predator or prey
But other
Focused attention
Only on the body
That has been me
I could still do it
Be the beautiful that carves
But does not imprint
The stone scale monument
That pressures and presents
Too, too acutely
Those brittle, thin fingers
And protruding spine
From every angle
Even the sides

Or, force myself
To wait out the urge, the blame
To suffer and suffocate,
Stay the too-quick beating
The unfathomable
Ache of my heart
And quiet its cries
For the scales to balance back out
For the knife to reverse course
Stop stabbing inwards
To make its sickening point
My own worst enemy
I did not place this curse