ONE morning,
at the beginning of your end,
step on a scale
and the numbers blend
all the way to the right.
All of your pants are tight.
A rash develops across your chest
and up along your neck.
You find yourself distressed,
your mind confused,
your heart races
towards the disconnect.

Passacaglia,
yes, how to chart my declivity?
Begin with Delilah
and her festooned hair.
End with this clumsy galoot
in wrinkled cashmere sweater.
A wedding dance gone athwart,
sibilant kisses twisting in the dark,
she forsook me for some galivant.
I’d been so gallant,
faint with hope
and left holding the cinquefoils.

TWO pills to swallow daily,
the horse pellet in the morn,
the troche in the eve,
scratch your animal side,
scaly, slowly going blind.
I don’t really want to see.

Twenty years remanded
with memory eidetic,
drowning in the reliquary
of discarded love.
Here is her blue barrette
with the broken clasp.
The reed to her clarinet
I savor in my mouth.
A thousand times I’ve tried to stop
and a thousand times relapsed.

I was dying as her votary.
My body grew recalcitrant.
As if I was asleep, suffused,
and floating in hydropsy,
my legs would not go anymore.

THREE bolus injections of insulin
plus the basal rate,
this is how my day segments.
The paramnesia will be gradual.
Music will lose timbre.

My unctuous friends galvanize,
prithee, they say,
go to the sylvan woods
and take a walk.
Or work in a rickyard
and stack some hay all day.
Anything to improve circulation.
They forget about the midnights
with my windows open
staring at lamplight,
serene in my cessation.

Let me hum the aria of neuropathy:
Toes are ostinato,
they disappear one by one.
The feet follow, tumbao.
Small blood vessels in my eye
proliferate and set the tone,
destroy the retinas.
And the waltz of kidney scars
will require the unwilling partner
of dialysis in the final analysis.
A stroke will be my coda.
Somebody will pick me up
and transfer my body
from wheelchair to adjustable bed.
They will feed me puree through
a straw or through a tube instead.

Imagine consciousness trapped,
subject to heat and sweat and itch,
captive to whatever they put on TV.
Pressure ulcers welter
in your refuse and stink.
Fungus gnats land
on your eyelashes
and all you can do is blink.

I only wonder how I will obsess,
whether I will only think of her
or only think of death.