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It is ten days to my surgery. My sadness,

like dew, descends nightly

in rivulets. I fear all I have left is the pain

to remind me I am still alive. Through the walls

of my bedroom, sliced thin as wafers

by the landlord’s cutthroat greed,

I hear my neighbor’s daughter go through

the lengths of her customary night songs,

the melodies carrying only as they would

from lungs that pose yet a garden, full

of life and love and breath. Only tonight they fail

to remind me of our shared living.

A single fa note lifts in the air with such power

it should bring to mind an angel or great bird.

But I think only of anesthesia, its clinical

horror. The nightmares where I yell and yell

and there’s no one to heed my thinning voice.

I am kept up all night long by that sermon

of the long sleep at our day’s end,

fearing, at last, that mine has come.

All my marked dreams line up in my thoughts

like ghosts of little children sick with ill fate,

their sharp bones cutting deeper still

into flesh. I kick the bucket

list out of my mind and think

outward instead—I think the unthinkable

thought of the soot that soon

will meet the fingers of my friends

and lovers when they try to reach me outside the land of memory.

We grow weary of joy, I’ve discovered,

like we’ll do of any stranger

who visits our cramped, creaking house

and for months, shows no sign of leaving.

I have housed, for weeks,

forgoing familiar sorrow,

what looks like joy between your heart

and mine. Now, to avoid that looming wolf

of war, tolerance having burned fast

and low like cheap candle. To avoid

that puerile peril, sure as the clangs

of kettles in a pail, I must smile

and sign your every stupid truce;

I must live in the gullible gut

of the animal of my being, and forget

my palace of reasoning. To make peace

in the cold castle of my mind, I return

today to joyless living, at least for a while.

Because to live here as a dervish dancing,

stung by ecstasy’s sweet stony fang,

is to step on the feet of crows

who, forgoing the sky’s endless pleats,

have made this rock their home.

Declare a state of emergency.

I have left my silly dance for the cold,

calculated march of the parade. In joy’s

old room, a phantom conspiracy

haunts all night and day. My mother

says: this is the peace that reigns

for a sake other than itself. But I do

not like its ugly face. I say this

to the mirror in me and it breaks

in agreement. But at night,

my heart yawns wide like a mouth

and I tell her to be still. I fear

(and forgive me for the cowardice) that my yearning will be the death of me