With the p.t. on the first day

Kevin McIlvoy

The p.t.
painfully
embraced me
in order to
assess my whole
potential for
recovery, and
in a whisper asked,
“What is the goal?” and
sat nearer. We faced my
negative image pinned
to the illuminator
mounted wall-wise with
well-made young humans in
skeletal or muscular
forms of excruciating,
sublime exertion, prosaic
skins folded inside steel drawers
containing strapping tape, mind pliers,
nitrile blue gloves, depressing tongues.

My goal is to surpass my former
frangible selves, so many and so
alike, that let light through the fractures
and gaps for a little while before
my efforts to heal seal me closed.

My goal is to be risible
and more risible, and to stop
repairing the invisible
or visible risible
qualities of unwinding
absurdity rewounding me.

I would like to purchase
an illuminator.

Actually my goal
is to have less and less
and at last none of the
expiring doses
of doeses-this and
doeses-that existing
for absolutely no
one’s benefit ever.

Could I not want
the justice and
the sentence and
the jail of a goal?

Could I be a steel
cabinet, my drawers
stainlessly silent?

Could I want not to
waste all my wanting? 

Could I be at a
different tilt of thought-of
and thought-if, and – at least in
life’s irrecoverable loves –
last no longer than the brief
story in which one wild
season of thawing ice-cliff
sheers off so often that it softens
to a mild pile unmightily
resembling nothing but
a child’s favorite
hill for sledding?

In answer,
the p.t.
sat nearer.

And we held
each other
together.