thermal maximum

i’m sitting here in my home office / it’s saturday afternoon on a sunny late july afternoon / “The Stream” is keeping me honest playing kick ass tunes on the Bose wave / this morning i made my famous “Ohio Chilli Beans” for the family cookout tomorrow / Annie is / as we speak / making her green bean dish out in the kitchen / life is steadily floating down the Muskellunge creek in the heavy summer heat / the cicadas buzz a relentless warning / the year’s thermal maximum is at hand / make haste…   

it’s hard to explain / hard to identify just when it happened / when i stopped being who i have always been / and started being the person i am now / the asteroid (read: my accident last year when i broke my leg) has a lot to do with it i’m certain / my recovery has not gone well / there have been complications / it seems as if every month i discover a new medical issue / and except for the surgeon that bolted me back together / the doctors have not been helpful…

i tell Annie that intimacy is job one / i am capable of such vast hypocrisy / it becomes a little physically harder every day for me to do the things that bring  (us) joy / i don’t come clean about this with her / i crank up my steely resolve / i will not relent / i grit my teeth and work though the pain…

she tells me everything is OK and we just need to focus on the things we have and can do together…

she tells me it’s the heat / she is right to some extent / it’s been pretty brutal this year / but we have had heat waves before / it’s not the same now…

she says she sees me as i am / i don’t see what she sees in what i have become…

i have always been a force to be reckoned with…

today i have never felt more helpless / fearful…

and i feel no connection whatever to the crippled thing i see in the mirror now / yet i love what i am inside / my awareness is a blessing and a curse / the vessel has become absurd and dysfunctional / humiliating…