Better Lyme Than You

I would like to thank Lyme disease
for its honesty.

A wild sentence.
A medically unsound little sonnet.
Still.

The tick arrived
with all the tact
of a prison shank,
which is to say
not much tact
but a commendable lack of hypocrisy.

It bit.
It infected.
It turned my bloodstream
into a complaint department.
My skull filled with nails.
My joints began striking.
It feels like my skeleton
got replaced with wet matches.

And yet,
I trust it more.

Because Lyme disease
does not run a long con.
It does not phone in
from behind reinforced glass
with a trembling voice
and a suitcase full of revisions.
It does not go missing
when something shinier wanders past,
then boomerang back
expecting me to pick up
exactly where it dropped me.

It does not require
a whole Greek chorus of excuses.
It does not need me
to help it workshop
the narrative.
It does not ask me
to admire its pain
while mine sits outside
in the rain.

It is a parasite.
It behaves accordingly.

This is what I mean
when I say I am relieved.

Not relieved to be sick.
I am not a maniac.
I am sweating through my clothes.
My heart keeps making suggestions.
My body feels like a condemned house
with bad wiring and one furious tenant.
The antibiotics hit
like punishment handed down
by someone who hates sunlight.

Still.

There is luxury
in a suffering
that does not flirt first.

There is dignity
in an affliction
that does not need me
confused to survive.

A tick does not alternate
between absence and appetite.
A tick does not drain you
in twelve contradictory accents.
A tick does not hold out
an empty cup
and call it intimacy.

It wants blood.
That’s the whole poem.

Meanwhile,
I have known another species of feeding,
the kind that prefers a telephone,
the kind that cannot touch you
so it learns to live
in your nervous system instead.

That kind feeds by weather.
By inconsistency.
By making the truth
change outfits mid-sentence.
By teaching your body
to brace at the ringtone.
By acting overwhelmed
only after it has eaten.
By wandering off
when another audience appears
and returning
when the applause dies.

That kind wants credit
for the bars between you.
Wants points
because the teeth were metaphorical.
Wants to be congratulated
for all the damage
it performed remotely.

Remarkable.
Innovative, even.

To be psychologically mugged
by someone in state custody.
To be emotionally pickpocketed
by a voice on a recorded line.
To get gaslit by a person
who literally has call limits.

And still,
somehow,
Lyme disease
comes off classier.

At least when it wrecks me,
it does not call back later
to see whether I can help it process
how hard the wrecking was for it.

At least when it takes,
it does not also want admiration.
It does not want friendship.
It does not want unrestricted visitation rights
to the scene of the crime.

It does not say
be patient.
It does not say
you know how I get.
It does not say
I never said that.
It does not say
why are you doing this to me
while standing knee-deep
in what it did.

It just makes me ill
and minds its business.

God.
Imagine.

So yes,
I am grateful for the Lyme disease.

Not because it is kind.
It is not kind.
It is vulgar,
mean-spirited,
low-rent,
and full of shit.

But it is at least
one thing at a time.

It is not trying to be
predator and victim,
wound and halo,
knife and alibi.

It does not expect me
to hold still
while it empties me out
and then thank it
for the character development.

That is a human flourish.

That is art.

That is where the real horror lives:
not in the tick,
not in the bacteria,
not in this feral little coup
inside my blood,
but in the fact
that I can lie here
feverish,
aching,
lit up with pain,
and think,

finally,
Something entered my body
and did not lie about it.