Untitled (I'm part of your therapy now)

I’m part of your therapy now says
the pleasant snap of dog’s jaws on a treat.
I read the article, like it on behalf of others, behavioral economists
making crazy plans for us to wave a crazy wand over pain of payment,
how to get around it and step with
two shoes into a glossy brick house with blue shutters—
how quiet it is there, how white the walls. Here, dish towels
dry on the oven-door handle, the dishwasher never used.
The wound is confusing so making sense of it
may not make it hurt less. There are years between
these types of purchases. Remember our trip to Kansas,
how I started talking about how my brain
has been the same for a while and how
you can see that in other people, that
realization, the same brain
all their lives. A lot more people
think or worry about the same-brain
entire-life problem than we can imagine. You’d
think fewer would. And there’s surely
too many people worrying about it
in one sense and not enough in the other of
knowing how a given brain moves through
a world more populated by other people
than any one of us can imagine, and among them
only a few people you really feel open with
like a diamond mine sometimes
or a coal mine at least that can be blasted back open
whenever a vein falls in on whoever’s down there.
Others are like squirrels in human dwellings,
you can only hear them in the roof or walls.
You talk about whether a part of you hurts and how
you feel about your body in the dark, how you
forget and remember things together
and have friends who you talk about other
friends with and not everyone gets used
to it. Our will to be in the world slips
with others and without each other’s elbows
to hold onto or set on the table. I would
land on my lonely ass and everyone in town
would tell the secrets they have,
ear to ear gossip would string its effect
in dark repetition of the push and pull
of air out of and into lungs until the sound becomes
permanently pressed on the brain, the back
of the neck, the shoulders and jaws and knuckles.
The history of ankles, noses, toes, bellies
barking at your heels, all those terrible haircuts,
the furniture you’ve found on the street or made vs.
the furniture you bought
wounded in some carelessness, reminders of
those moments in life whose particulates
dissipate into the atmosphere in parts per million or
lottery ticket winnings, shavings against hope
of a future of regular paychecks dashed daily
in what the news tells us about statistical likelihoods
one demographic in one zip-code number as opposed to others
which we wish affected how people felt, so they’d feel
differently about themselves as opposed to us or
that they saw what we saw
in them that they didn’t, yet knowing
that in us they maybe see something we may not like,
like the sloppy-armed furniture
given from the farthest ends of the family—I can’t believe
I let you convince me to throw it out. I find
the expression “thin-skinned” so strange, how they say
the strong master their emotions, that wilderness of after-images
working on ours. Rational actors, use of society, use to society—
made to manage ourselves and plan a course through the churn
almost out of a want-to-want way of thinking,
never a wish to give ourselves over
as if on some faraway beach.

At a certain point all the jobs
become worth more or less than their pay. What a person is
called to do, despite the warning of a life without
retirement savings or assets or healthcare, starts to feel tight
from the throat down into the chest and up into the ears.
The person most interesting in a therapist’s day,
the kindest customers and customer service agents.
Maybe there’s a difference, maybe there isn’t
between a call to care and a call to organize.
Facts other us; facts are all we have to hold on to
about as good as a mirror on the other side of the room.
Our view of ourselves and others, presuming
we can identify brain patterns and backtrace
through frames of shared experience that at some point
became almost like a still life of fruits, vegetables, glassware,
a loaf of bread. The way houseplants tell us what they need.
The odd angles of the room in the glass, like the world
our folks raised us in and used to understand themselves in:
such as how it feels differently washing hands in the bathroom or kitchen,
the trusted sites and servers. A virus pings the unique
intersections in our lives, another string bumping up personalizing stories about
how we’re coping, what helped carry us through. I used to want
to be a problem to be given attention or to just be different
and interesting in ways that later made me embarrassed,
ashamed or both. Now I try to hide it because it pays better to be similar
or to only be different in ways that read well. But I still
want to be liked and accepted. I am so uncomfortable
with myself that I sometimes go out of my way
to make others feel comfortable with themselves.
I worry that too could be a want-to-want way of thinking
because in people like that you can tell that they’re for you because
they let you know they care in terms of the cost of loss to
the human community. The scrape
of the car keys gently but often around the lock
eventually leaves its mark.

Sound of an ice cooler being stirred, snow shoveled,
the high tone of a fan versus the low tone of a furnace.
Both seasons affecting the degrees of windows open,
closed and a finger wetted in jest held in the air
to ascertain current path of breeze through apartment
which we see traced in the dog hair that rolls like
tumbleweeds on the hardwood floor where
the things we spill get sticky and the blood we spill
seems so intimate. Mostly from fingers and feet at least.
The nails due for a trim scrape through the wax
and shellac. Vomit mostly from the dog
who will rise and huff when he hears,
before I do, unless asleep, the tone of the engine of
the car you’re still paying off and you let me drive.
I have kept the old spark plugs in a door as part of
one of those symbolic messes that remind me of things I’ve done
that I’m proud of. To have known of the results of
the DNA genealogy before mom said what they were.
To refrain from ever telling you about the asymmetry
of my face for fear that you will never be able
to un-see it. Commit self to well-being. I mistake
the sound of your key in the lock when it’s just a pop in the refrigerator
or the next door neighbors or tags on other dogs’ collars.