Broken Ribs and Punctured Lungs

I am so exhausted of bleeding effort to convince myself

That even ten percent of what I want in my life is present

Attempting to cultivate to make it what I want

I gave up so long ago in choosing what I want

I look around the innards of my decision

The sky seems so arbitrary; I think I once wanted to be put to work

To be desired as needed, to be of service

As a force that makes a heart leap and in this

I knew God in a way the absence sets me adrift

To rummage through music, poetry, yoga, meditation, and writing

To find a substitute for connection, for blood and the breath

To combat the silence

The choke chain of routine following me to sit behind computers

Steer a Chevrolet without guiding it into a telephone pole

The breakfast table staring at the corn flakes

The shower tiles and the yellow rerun scrub

Recycling air for a taste of art as if I did not know were the beauty lives

Reaching my hand out and seeing that length of time before

The fingers sit extended the arm exhausts in the non-response

The mind succumbs to vomit in the writing, then at the writing

The writing becomes the pin to the grenade holding on

Like as long as there might be something worth writing

The living might be eligible to continue as if this were a puzzle

Materializing some image to be understood better

Not understood, just less hazy, less fuzz in the lens

Hoping that I could quit wanting what does not want me

To find an avenue that was healthy, possible, and reciprocated

For longer than short enough to break a man in shrapnel

Just long enough to make him care that extra bit that feels like every rib is broken

That each patella is shattered, so there is no limping or lung available

Just impaled breath and lying there at the mercy of tires not to run him over

As he tries to regrow bone watching the skies rotate

So he thinks one day at a time, just get through, maybe something will happen

Maybe he can find a breath in the motions

And he does, and he loses it, the punctures, the fractures return from new terms

Melding bones hoping his spirit does not completely escape