An Insider's Guide on How to be Sick

Never say the words 'this is not my life'
This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the night.
This pain that woke your lover, chased him to another room
to another life...

This save your prescription with side effects worse than the disease.
This please let me have one month where I read more poems than warning labels.
This not knowing what the test will say.
This pray pray pray
This airplane's medical emergency landing
This shame when you can't walk.
Shame when you can't fuck
Shame when you're home alone sobbing on another Friday night.

Say 'This is my life.
This is my precious life.
This is how badly I want to live'

Say 'Sometimes you have to keep pulling yourself up by the whip.
Take punch after punch to the face forward
To the head up'
And still uncurl the fist of your grief like a warm blanket on the cool earth of your faith
Say every waiting room is the clime where you will finally take shape to fit into the keyhole of your own gritty heart.
To open mercy.
To open your siren throat.

Say every fever is a love note to remind you that there are better things to be than cool.
Fuck cool.
Fuck every pair of skinny jeans,
from the month your muscles started atrophying to a size two.
Say fuck you, to anyone who asks you if you eat enough.
Say, how do you not know that is so fucking rude.

Remember you never have an obligation to quiet the hurricane inside your chest.
Especially on a day when another healthy person suggests 'you would feel so much better if you would just focus your breath into a Buddha beam of light'
Like that light is going to miraculously dissolve the knife that's been churning in your kidneys for the last six fucking months.

Say Sunshine please, go back to your job at the aroma therapy aisle at Whole Foods and leave me alone.
I know how to talk to God,
and God does not expect me to use my inside voice.
God knows how goddamn hard I am working to become a smooth stone.
So I can skip on my back across this red red sea.
So I can trust deep in my screaming bones.

Everything is a lesson.
Lesson #1 through infinity;
You will never have a greater opportunity to learn to love your enemy than when your enemy is your own red blood.

Truce is a word made of velvet.
Truce is a word made of velvet.
Wear it everywhere you go.