Death on a Stairwell

This kind of exhaustion

Belongs on a billboard

By the side of the freeway:

“Stop by our clinic

Before you die from  

Emotional prostration and depravity!

 Get the help you need IMMEDIATELY.”

I am required to walk up and down

These flights of stairs everyday

Delivering this document to that person

Or this person

All of them girls

With short, bouncy, brown hair

Typing and hustling, giggling  

In this busy, assiduous work space.  

But my head

Is static,

Permanent anesthesia

Sometimes thinking about how easy

It looked

When he died because though his breaths

Were stunted and labored,

He didn’t know anything….and wasn’t in pain

Slack jaw and dead head

And maybe that’s how everyone should go

Wrapped warm like an embryo

In an intimate darkness

Where the hearts and panic

Of others are comfortably meaningless

Maybe the rest of us are actually

 Fools

To wait to see what gore

Will claw in to our bodies

And grimly seize our breath.    

I’m going to deliver this document

To this bitch

With the short hair

And the perma smile

This document about work shit

That no one really gives a rat’s ass about

But  

What I am thinking about

Is how easy it is.

That maybe I wish I were dying

Right now

How inevitable the process

How easy the pace

Particularly when you are the vector,

The deliverer,  

Of your macabre but inevitable fate.