a fear of being judged is the two-hundred-and-seventh bone
in the body and no surgery can shave it down or cut it out.
my father still calls me son, but with a different tone than before,
as when I accomplish a goal:

“i’m proud of you son”

like he might sense i’m about to leave and want to lure me
back without the theatre of foregiveness

would it kill someone to know

i’m not any less of a wound now,
more accurately a slight bruise, not purple or foreboding

but there, creeping under the sleeve
like a birthmark only a lover would notice.

after years of cold turkey, i’ve turned the blinders on
and it’s amazing what i can see, but also what i couldn’t

on the mend, like my own hands and what hurts they made.
how april fools i was pretending i could stand

without a wall, or eat without a hunger.

bruce springsteen’s Nebraska was the last noise i conked out
to five summers ago, and now the album plays like

the kind of memory u keep when u don’t want all the parts
but a handful justify the rest so you do.

a secret is that everyone wants to suffer
to survive. to say they’ve been to hell and back and learned

the lessons. but there are none in a place called hell.
on the verge if dying, i felt the body fail. there was

nothing i could do.

i didn’t push beyond that failure, and so it stuck to me
and i drag it—now—to the cvs, to a place called home

and to the bus. to my parents’ house. to a lover’s
bed and out of it towards the bathroom and also

to the kitchen for water. i make peace with my face.
i look good in a desperate light.

humbled, like a moth is humbled by its god.

the one we made to better see
the road at night.