Confessions XXIV

The COVID patients cough in my face.    They can’t control themselves.    They don’t wear the

mask.    How could they wear a mask when they can’t breathe?    They can’t even handle a

nebulizer.    They just struggle.    The letters DNR in red above their heads.    I remember the

moments when exes fell out of love with me.    Exact moments.    I can recall them when I want

to hurt.    Sometimes I want to hurt.    Too often.    I have to work on that.    Once, after having

sex and how I could feel nothing from her.    Another time, how I hugged her and she was a

ghost.    People can turn into ghosts.    Even without death.    They can become wicks, no fire,

hardly even a trace of remnants of the heat that was there.    Was it there?    I’ve never worn a

tux.    Ever.    A girl in undergrad said, No one will ever marry you.    Why would you say

that?    I was horrified.    Why would you say something like that?    Because it’s the truth.    And

it has been.    The horror.    When I go to the V.A. waiting room, I notice how the legs there look

like boxes.    I stare at their legs.    Some of them don’t have legs.    I don’t stare at the absence of

legs.    I stare at the boxes.    They have a little library there, in the V.A. waiting room.    People

donate books.    Guys steal the books, sell them for drug money.    We sat in a semicircle.    A

guy told the group about picking up a body and the brains leaking out.    He held the body, brains

getting on his pants.    That’s the way he worded it.    Brains on his pants.    We all sat there,

silent.    We saw our own things in our heads.    What was in our heads was the clicking of the

metal fences in hell.    The way they sound when you run your hands across them as you’re

walking.    And then you realize your hands are gone.    They have been replaced.    You can

imagine what with.    My cousin put a gun in his mouth.    He didn’t fire it.    They caught him

like that.    The gun in his mouth.    Told him to put it down.    He motioned like he was pulling

the trigger.    Miming.    Made a bang sound with his mouth.    My father told me this.    A week

before Christmas.    The tree in the background would later catch fire in an alley.    We’d all

watch it from the window.    All of us.    Flames.    Cold.    Huddled.    So close.