It's already December
This year snapped my spine and spilled
my vertebrae across twelve rivers

before collapsing
I opened doors
that should have stayed locked, bounced glass *****
against concrete floors.
I ended rather than enduring.

Drinking ****** defeat
I shrank into beetles that belong in the dark
with rock and mildew mud and bones
I lost my own. Undid my feet
and crawling slunk into an anonymous street.

Pale slug with deathly eyes
embedded in a patch of sky too dark to see
except at some drunken dreadful hour
when
the light is all wrong:
me, at the end of this year.

Would it have been fair to ask another to rescue me
I don't know.
Perhaps not, being so unfit to return the favour-
To demand the labour of loving someone so far above one
as to want them endlessly.

I am finite and small. A bare
and ugly wall. In another world this would
be acceptable. Not mine not now.

Not even a dead cow but the worm that swims through its
swollen gut. I resist
nothing, I represent less.
Tonight I confess: death is the more honorable option
If I had any honour.

With none to my name I suffer the worse fate: to persist.

To persist.