An Insider’s Guide on How to be Sick, Andrea Gibson [ID below: Never say the words &

An Insider’s Guide on How to be Sick, Andrea Gibson 

[ID below: 

Never say the words ‘this is not my life’ This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the nightThis pain that woke your lover, chased her to another room to another lifeThis fevered faintingThis tremorring chestThis mangled kiteThis panic like a cave of batsThis nurse drawing blood wearing doubled gloves This insurance doesn’t cover that This hurried paycheck of doctor after doctor after doctorThis stethoscope that never hears your heartThis hospital bedThis florescent darkThis save your prescription with side effects worse than the diseaseThis please let me have one month where I read more poems than warning labelsThis not knowing what the test will sayThis pray pray prayThis airplane’s medical emergency landingThis shame when you can’t walkShame when you can’t fuckShame 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 upAnd still uncurl the fist of your grief like a warm blanket on the cool earth of your faithSay every waiting room is the clime where you will finally take shape to fit into the keyhole of your own gritty heartTo open mercyTo open your siren throat  Say every fever is a love note to remind you that there better things to be than cool Fuck coolFuck every pair of skinny jeans From the month your muscles started atrophying to a size twoSay fuck you to anyone who asks you if you eat enoughSay how do you not know that is so fucking rudeRemember you never have an obligation to quiet the hurricane inside your chestEspecially 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 monthsSay Sunshine, please go back to your job at the aroma therapy aisle at Whole Foods and leave me aloneI know how to talk to Godand God does not expect me to use my inside voiceGod knows how goddamn hard I am working to become a smooth stoneSo I can skip on my back across this red red sea So I can trust deep in my screaming bonesEverything is a lessonLesson #1 through infinityYou will never have a greater opportunity to learn to love your enemy than when your enemy is your own red bloodTruce is a word made of velvet Truce is a word made of velvetWear it everywhere you goBandage the window where you screamed at the mountain for forgetting your footsteps Trust that mountain is climbing youEspecially on the days you inevitably want to avalanche everyone who loves youWhen you can’t walk from the bed to the bathroom without clenching at the wallsWhen you can’t imagine you can fall to pieces in another’s sturdy arms and still be seen as wholeRemember, the universe only became the universe when it shattered into dustAnd that shattering is the one thing you can always trust enough to tell you the truth is so quiet you may never have heard it without a stethoscope pressed to your chestThat is to say in the house of your compassion its possible illness will be the landlineAnd its how you will begin to hear the world clear as a pin droppingThe downpour of its eyesThe long quarter of its broken throat On my most broken days when my faith is a willow and the pain has nothing but an ax to giveThe only thing I want than to die is to live Is to live to hear my neighbor play his music obnoxiously loudTo get cut off in traffic fifty more timesTo get broken up with while standing in line at the DMVTo have another doctor drive another needle into my skin for the hundredth timeSo I can say, for the hundredth time, that needle is the needle on a record player, Doctor, everything and I mean everything can learn how to sing.]