Spite

Tom C. Hunley

This song keeps following me around.

Stalking me. Not even a full song.

A snippet from a funny movie:

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

Jason Segel’s character sings to himself:

Everybody hates you. Everybody wishes you were dead.

It cracks me up. Which means it makes me laugh.

But The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

is about depression and despair.

Why does my head throw these lyrics

like rocks at my head? I can’t tell

if I’m cracking up or cracking up or both.

When my head is clear, I know I’m not

important enough for anyone to hate.

The only one who ever wants me dead is me.

I stay alive in spite of me. I’m full of spite.

In “The Orchestra,” William Carlos Williams wrote

                   [I]n spite of the wrong note,

         I love you. My heart is

innocent.

I’m full of wrong notes. Ask my bandmates.

I love to play anyway.

Jillian, Cy, old schoolmate, I love you

and your poem, “Despite,”

in which last night’s man

says he’d kiss you

despite your disability.

That ending! I know

that word. It means

the desire to hurt someone.

And now I’m disabled.

I can park anywhere.

My immune system thinks I’m a disease.

Thinks the cure is, first, to hurt me, arthritis

all over, then, by fusing my spine and vertebrae

to form one big bone, to turn me

into something like a turtle.

Most of my life, most places

I’ve gone, I’ve felt like a turtle

out of water. Upside down.

My immune system doesn’t

hate me. It’s a misunderstanding.

But it does wish I were dead.

I stay alive in spite of this.