Postage was hell

I mailed a dead guy

asking how he was doing

and I got a message back

that he was okay

and I shouldn’t worry about him

because he had the dying thing handled

but he was worried how I was getting on

and told me to focus on living

because that decided how you die

and while we were both the sum of the stuff of life,

only one of us had life to stuff

and the other was stuffed with life,

which says nothing of the postage costs

from the netherworld

*

Everyone can be a poet

if you just show them

that their lives are miserable

but they can make themselves worse

by scraping themselves

with a blunt pen or fingernail

shedding and shedding

touching the untouched

and when it ends

while they do

they can maybe have a new them

that isn’t them

in the haze and coughs and crap

but a better, pieced together,

less miserable them

*

There are days

I wake thinking I can

do it all

and others when

all I can do

is wake to thinking

and others yet when

all I do

is sleep