Three Weak, Five Fold
I remember spiraling,
my vision dizzying from pushing myself hard.
Was this sick?
Am I sick?
Salt stung, like sulfur shoved up the nose.
Rub it out, eyes peeled back wide like I'm looking for an anchor.
I must have spun around the room.
My legs feeling like they looked.
Crooked and bent?
Or was that the world?
Bending and twisting as the blood exited my body like it was trying to say I made more than I should.
"I don't think it's supposed to exit there."
But the doctor isn't inclined to agree with me that something is happening to me.
"You should be okay."
I think he said.
“You should be okay.”
I think she said.
Dammit, they all sound the same.
Frustration mounting, I laugh, some sort of dark humor bubbling up as I try to choke back whatever bile comes to mind.
Or throat. Everything is nauseating. Food, my thoughts...
Fucking cynics. I'd snort that to myself, telling the clerk comically that the blood is coming out. And there's no cuts or wounds to show for it, but it's there and I'm walking.
Fuck if I know how.
And I'd pass out in the lobby, waiting because I 'wasn't an emergency'
Who knew that this was what it felt like to put my life in the medical grade glove.
The blue hands of someone's nine to five, or more aptly put someone's six to fourteen.
And their God toy of choice was a pill.
Something they'd shut me up with.
Some sort of anti-bacterial.
Something to turn my stomach into one of those porcelain thrones.
If only my gut wasn't porous and unhoned.
I don't think those pills are turning me around.
Fuck, this agony.
This is agony.
He's showing me no results,
but he's licking his dry and cracking lips, looking at me from an angle like I'm some weird specimen that's here for a new drug fix.
I swear, I'm not an addict. I just don't want to feel like I'm dying.
And yet, the way he stares at me comes in and out like reality is nothing but a fuzzy dream.
A dream that I might wake up from, or not.
But there's nothing left for me to believe after twice, thrice, and fourth on the way. I think I might scream, but then they're peeling me up from the porch like some shitty kid's sticker stuck to a desk.
And I can't keep control, I can't drive anymore.
And I'm sure my pulse is somewhere erratically above me.
Dangling as much as the IV bag I've been forced to catheter.
God, let the pain take me away.
Let it take me away, like it robs me of my words.
Of my ability to believe I'm a walking, talking human and turn me into some pain-afflicted thing. Just give me a break.
Drugged up again. And I'm riding out into the trees, watching the dark spin around me.
I'm sure she's in the front seat, wondering what the hell they did to me. What the hell I'm saying, but the strong arms of the man who loves me is more than enough to drag me up from the gutter. To jostle some sense into this blackened mind.
To shove off the waft of whatever drug I've become.
God, they're trying to kill me. Trying to kill me to join the rest so I can be another bill, something profitable. It's all the same.
If it weren't for the man who saw my tired eyes, hanging on for life that next afternoon. I don't know if I'd be here. I don't think I'd be alive.