i. Monday

all my life
i've peered outside the window
of a ruined palace;
the kingdom called my body
where i nursed
tumors all alone, where
the woman wearing purple was
impartial to my plight. she wore
pursed lips and sky blue eyes,
a kind of noh mask,
but she managed, she managed,
though she was crumbling
and had to finger her
way through the makeup and plaster,
a painful sloughing like a chicken
skinned alive,
she was born again, born inside of me,
as a mother, no less.
firm and erect like
a field of March daisies
she learned to love again,
to juggle pills and day old
bread.

ii. Tuesday

my hair continues to fall
precipitating its loneliness
like mist,
and i am endemic to this laurel
wreathe around my head.
you're a warrior, you'll be better
than the greeks in athens, they said.
i imagine this crowd,
nurses, doctors and all the like,
cheering me on as i hurl javelins
through thin air,
not outwards but inward,
pierce this wry black mass,
stop these dead nuclei
from congesting.

iii. Wednesday

the cat scan shows
something peculiar.
it's like a map i can't read
because the roads are all
tangled and the image is
archaic: moths and globules
suspended between the trunks
of trees, silly ornaments,
unimportant maybe.
if i scrutinize this closely
i can see something less luminous,
moon skulled,
its mouth puckering evilly
behind spindle bones
flayed in every which
direction. but i'm glad,
i'm glad it's obscured by
the lines of these dull
white flames. i wish for it
to go away, recede and recede
until it goes back where
it came from.
and some days i wonder
who flung this wrecking ball,
who can i blame from my genealogical
line for this hot potato game

iv. Thursday

i've tried it all
frankincense,
myrrh,
banging my pots and pans,
baseball bats, voluminous tears,
meditation, oblivion powered
saucers flying off the page,
their laser beams eyeing me
recklessly and endlessly.
why all this imagination
when i have something real
inside me,
a clump that refuses to be
molded

v. Friday

and i do wonder what this
mysterious computer chip and
barnacle of wire
has to do with nerve
and skin,
its soft whirring,
its imitations of how
a tree can breathe
fills me with incalculable
terror, such that the
cat inside me leaps.
i can feel my body
cut up in sections,
diagonal dimensions.
once again i have to be
opaque, i have to stand
this white light as it
defiles me,
rummages the private cabinets
unloosing proteins,
nucleic acids.
how is it that they
prolong life in
all the wrong places?

vi. Saturday

this is the day of rest
but God, this is where i put
my foot down. this is where
i wrestle you through
the punitive measures i take
against you,
defacing altars,
kicking crosses when they're down,
tee-totaling your tithe.
i want mold and fungi
and the must of ruins.
i want pigeons by my window
and the sun lapping
at my darkness.

vii. Sunday

after all,
it was really me who was
the plastic one,
it was me who was easily broken,
it was me who's life had
been flaking away
ever since the beginning.
death is a kind of vision,
you can see many places at once
as if peering through the facets
of a diamond.
it's also a very heavy ball
and i had to escape this body,
gelatinous with disaster,
you see nothing but my carcass,
i see this also.
so don't judge me, don't make this
face because i am floating
five feet off the ground,
i want you to take this husk
with both hands, caress it until
your knees do buckle and you fall,
lost and then found.