​Self-Denial

Noun.  
1. foregoing material things, asceticism.
2. renunciation of the ego, abnegation.

His thermostat is set at 58. 
The Sealy and Honda are both sagging 
and obsolete.  He no longer remembers sex, 
what it was like.  Never a vacation, 
let alone a cruise. His sweatshirt and jeans are
faded but fresh.  Every room is spotless, 
all-too-clean.  In dust are scraps of shed skin.  
Scrubbing out the tub is like scouring himself.  

In the void of his closet, one blue suit, 
a relic of prehistoric weddings, 
hangs like a traitor executed long 
ago.  There’s still some money he hasn’t 
given away.  He no longer fasts but eats
little and plainly.  Not possible, he’s learned, 
to be without having.  Maybe that’s why 
hermit saints—Onuphrius, Phosterius--
had to be fed from on high; renouncing
used up all their strength.  He pictures angels 
dropping off groceries from the celestial 
pantry, salads and flat bread.  Has he toiled  
to despise the world only to love himself,  
humility twisted to solipsistic pride?

Self is commonly a selfish prefix, 
hyphen-bound to interest, serving, satisfied, 
aggrandizing.  He prefers the blushing
modesty of effacement and the 
wild Dostoyevskian abasement— 
self-murder, too.  It runs in his family; 
he can boast of suicides on both sides. 
 
He’s looked into some verses from the East  
and found it’s easier to deny a self that
perishes many times or not at all.
With a sartorial metaphor 
Krishna reveals that the self is not 
at all singular, just one digit in 
an unreckonable sum of grey 
sweatshirts, blue suits, carapaces, fur: 
 
         Worn-out garments
         Are shed by the body. . .
         New bodies are donned
         By the dweller, like garments.

In the next round he could be a dust mite,
supermodel, jackal, toothless beggar.  
The Buddha makes even less of the self,  
preaching soullessness, Anatta.  Nothing’s 
there to go a-transmigrating, just a 
flux of consciousness briefly glued together, 
a more or less tedious roman fleuve.

Is it to make a self that he’s scorned all
comfort, pleasure, toys?  If so, what did he make, 
freed from such distractions?  An ironic 
flattering of the ego?  A mind like what’s 
left behind by a rising mist?  Has he 
denied his soul just to wind up self-obsessed?   

He scorns those who deny themselves nothing, 
who wallow and collect, whose existence 
seems a tally of purchases.  They flit 
from wife to mistress, from being thrilled by 
a Lexus to delighting in the latest phone.  
Don’t they lose the self by indulging it,  
pumping up a blimp soul, bloated and hollow?   
He believes that if you deny your self
nothing you’ll soon make it nothing too.

It’s said those holy hermits in the desert 
were tempted by treacherous devils,
seducers—perhaps disguised as angels​.