Blood inside, blood outside, blood all over 
For days it rains red, 
messy, sleep-broken, unspeakable, red-basined days
The body on a short leash,
Punishment enough, I thought, for an eon of sins…

Then nothing: no flow, no stream, 
no whisper in the cistern of the soul
Just the pain of bone-dry efforts
Burn, burn, the smoke of effort,
no fire of release…
No higher expression 
of the body’s deepest need than this:
    Gotta pee! 

We struggle down to the ER, 
dedicated spouse now designated driver – 
     thank goodness! 
Or the impatient patient would have run the lights
through glorious, summer-green, upper-crust Milton,
     school-house of presidents,
to a season’s early end. 
Succumbing (notices would read) to a deadly combo
of scabs and plasma,
victim of broadly fired radioactive treatments 
performed in a prior day  
     by optimistic clinicians, slightly off-mark 
in a crowded neighborhood of organs. 

Somebody please, we beg the healers, 
free me from this inner strain. 
For I am bound upon a wheel of fire,
an old man in a rag of flesh, 
who does but slenderly understand what’s bloody up.
                        

I walk slowly uphill.
It’s how I do everything.
Something has tipped the world off balance.
Now the sidewalk, the dirt road, the woodland path,
     is always trending up.
Strange… I remember thinking tasks completed, 
      gardens planted: 
‘All downhill from here.’

The world is green, a healthy color.
I dream of swapping flesh with the leaves 
that swarm the hillside,
     pirouetting in the devil-may-care late summer breeze.
But then, in autumn’s termination, all must wither and go under…
Well, yes, in the end, just a question of timing.

The great shade of the forest
stirs music in the minor key.
I will climb these heights, 
once more possess such sights 
in a theater of the heart. 

My feet regain the path,
reclaim their strength, their range of motion, 
renew my journey…
both up and down.