[Spend Your Fire]

Fifty Fahrenheit. The Snowflakes that make it at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Some women are like that. Some men. Individual every-bodies. Some of us hold on long enough to touch down.

That one day my immune system had me in bed, (was it bed?), nothing left to vomit. My mouth was 'back-from-gut-Gatorade'. Blankets weren't covered in sweat and vomit. They were sweat. They were vomit.

What was I? A vibration? A vulgar vomit encrusted immuno-inhibited morphine makes it to the bathroom if timed right, time?

What for?

A punch in the face goes away. That's time: Punch, beginning. Pain, middle. Healed, end.

What was Time for this pain? What did when have to do with healing this hurt?

A little more every day, the cells set up shop to wage a defense... from what? But they keep setting up and after a time the preparation for the attack becomes the diseased agent of attack.

There's a feeling something isn't right. The environment is hazardous somehow. Shields up! "We've got this."

More and more cells, troops out, stock up... years go to decades and there's too much military for one body to sustain. Police rule.

The more troops pumped out the bigger the drain, the more the house suffers, the louder the cry for help.

You hurt yourself to help yourself. On autopilot.

Nodules like barracks show on your calves then quads then hit waist high-a forest fortress of nodsum.

Your eyes want to see the enemy. Why can't they see the threat? Send forces! The band of brothers so bunched bulges iris into lens. More havoc! Send more, help!

Blood for eyes. Blood and Blue Police State body. The more it hurts itself the more it hurts itself to help itself. Barely two months go by, barely a step out of a chair, eighty pounds lost, blue eyes near full red.

How can you get to the bathroom? How can you move your body when it moves so much?

Auto-immune attack. Sarcoidosis in some tissue. Lupus in other, where the tissue focalized to attack a central point.

A high dose of prednisone for years kept it at bay, slowed the military march to a barely acceptable regulated, elevated level. A decrease in dose and inflammation rose. For near a decade that was the dance.

Immuno-inhibitors, methotrexate, pain medication for the inflammation of the neuro-system where the forces spread.

Chair-bound pain. Percocet gets me to the bathroom and the fridge if I time it right.

Those days the kitchen was further away than the moon, morphine got me in the car to pick my son up from school.

In the dizzy dirge Death comes, he's polite with a dark sense of humor. A potty-mouth. I suppose if you're Death incarnate you've literally seen it all.

What's dark humor to Mr. Lights-out?

"Shit, you look like crap, you oughta get to the bathroom. Or...?" He offered me his hand.

He's beautiful, you know, Death I mean, like a wonderful father.

"I'm here if you need me, but you don't got this," the bedspread was a sheet of paper He pressed his finger to, "You are this."

Though He's beautiful, maybe because he is, I placed my finger where his was and wrote my sentence for the day, "Stay."

A thirty-minute crawl. I made it to the bathroom to piss and shit and vomit all at once, while I decided what life meant now I decided to live and not what I could handle but what I was, and why it was worth staying, and how I could keep it going.

I stopped the immuno-injections. I started the climb to myself.

What was wrong?

The world is so much.

Everything!

All the light, sounds and sense we take it all in, we have to express it, we have to let shine out what shines in or we burn from the inside out.

We all ingest the World's Fire. What a great gift! And responsibility.

The Warning Label:

Be careful how you spend your fire but make certain you do.

Hold too much and you burn from the inside out.

I held way too much light in.

My body wasn't broken.

It wasn't enough.

S.J. Wynn
+he Ghos+