Better Lyme Than You (Fever Dream Remix)
I am beginning to think
the tick had better bedside manner.
Not good bedside manner.
Not kindness.
Not anything you could embroider
on a pillow
without alarming the guests.
But honesty,
in the old brutal sense.
It found flesh.
It chose flesh.
It entered
with the single-minded grace
of a bullet.
Now my body
has all the charm
of a cursed motel.
The plumbing screams.
The wiring spits.
My heart misfires
like a cheap gun in a glove box.
It feels like my skeleton
got replaced with wet matches,
all that soft collapse,
all that damp refusal to hold.
And still,
I prefer this.
I prefer the bacterial farce.
The swamp-fever vaudeville.
The microscopic thug
with its one ugly hymn:
blood, blood, blood.
Because this little monster
does not aspire
to innocence.
It does not call me
from a cement shoebox
with a voice gone syrupy,
trying to slide its weather
under my door.
It does not disappear
the second a brighter room opens
and then drift back in
expecting the lamp still lit,
the bed still turned down,
the devotion still warm.
It does not ask me
to babysit the knife.
That, to me,
is elegance.
A parasite
that can commit
to the bit.
No rotating masks.
No costume trunk
of explanations.
No emotional shell game
where the missing coin
is always my sanity.
It bites.
It blooms.
It drags a filthy brush
through the bloodstream.
It hangs little lanterns of pain
in the joints,
sets the skull ringing,
turns the muscles
into a drawer full of snapped rosaries.
Hideous.
But coherent.
Meanwhile,
there is another species of illness
that never needed skin.
It feeds by whiplash.
By reversal.
By selective vanishing.
By making the truth
change dresses in the next room
and come back out
claiming it was always wearing this.
That illness cannot touch you,
so it colonizes interpretation.
It moves into the pause
after the collect call.
It breeds in the tiny delay
before the tone.
It lives off your willingness
to stay teachable
in the mouth of a lie.
It is one thing
to be bitten.
It is another
to be kept on a wire
like laundry in bad weather,
snapping,
snapping,
snapping,
while somebody miles away
acts astonished
that you are frayed.
At least the tick
never asked
for emotional continuity.
At least the tick
never arrived carrying
three mutually exclusive selves
and expected me
to seat them all at the table.
At least the tick
never left the room
to entertain itself elsewhere
then returned
licking its teeth
and called that overwhelm.
There is a grandeur
to straightforward evil.
That is the humiliating lesson.
I have been unwell
in two different dialects,
and the one spoken by bacteria
is easier on the ear.
One invader
made a bonfire of the body.
The other turned my mind
into one of those funhouses
where the floor tilts,
the mirrors smirk,
and every exit
opens back into its mouth.
One left a rash.
One left a courtroom
permanently in session.
One does not care
whether I forgive it.
One seems to require
a standing ovation
for every fresh injury
it manages to explain
as an unfortunate misunderstanding
in which I was, somehow,
alarmingly involved.
So yes,
I am grateful for Lyme disease.
Ghastly sentence.
True as a blade.
Not because it is merciful.
It is tacky,
vindictive,
low-born,
and crawling with bad intentions.
But it does not need me
to call the suffering beautiful.
It does not ask
for one more chance
to clarify what the suffering meant.
It does not sit
in its own wreckage
wearing my face
like a paper mask.
It simply ruins me
and goes silent.
What a gift,
to be harmed
without the additional labor
of translation.
What a blessing,
to ache cleanly.
To lie here
fever-bright,
pill-bitter,
my blood full of mutiny,
and know at least this:
something entered me
wanting damage,
did the damage,
and did not once
try to pass itself off
as love.