Subtitles

 

 

What you don’t plan on, once you’re disabled,

isn’t so much about the physical.

Don’t get me wrong, on one hand,

it is so very much about that,

yet what you’ll really never see coming

has so much more to do with selfishness.

Extreme selfishness you never knew

was festering inside you like that cancer

geneticists say we all carry, just waiting to be ignited.

Yes, the selfish side of you that realizes

you’ll never grieve anyone or anything

the way you’ll mourn the loss of yourself.

People may come and go,

tragedies will flash across screens with subtitled headlines

running underneath in nineties movie credit font

describing as concisely as possible

the depths of the world’s depravity, but your mind,

yes your mind, will be stuck.

You’ll be in that endless loop, an ongoing search, questioning,

pining, wondering where is the body you’ll never see again.

The one you’ll wish you could’ve said good-bye to

if you’d have known that that last time you saw it,

that you were in it, was the last time you’d see it, feel it.

What you can never plan on

about being disabled is not so much

the rearranging of your form

rather the searing, singeing scarification of your soul.