So I'm really not that grateful to be here

Pardon me if I don’t see God’s great charity in skipping my death in order to ordain a new destiny for me as a staggering neuralgic. This hunger for gratitude around me, this discomfort with any other response but humble endurance and thankfulness for the fulness of his benevolence because I lived–-what is it but a salve to the horror of death? People want to see this. It helps them believe that serious illness is really all for the best. Is it magnanimous to see mercy in this condition? Is it the dog’s still-wagging tail after a beating? Is it even sane to feel grateful?

No, I am not grateful. I lived a life of constant physical challenge, both to better my health as a child and to foster a vigorous old age. I was cheated of both. I am not grateful for being here and I am not happy. God’s real gift would have been to take me when I fell. I do not live each day as it comes and I do not live in the fullness of his bountiful plan. I live in rage. I will not be happy until the vigor I enjoyed as a 55-year-old returns to me, or He, in his divine justice, finds more amusement elsewhere and lets me go. 

I do thank him for taking an already vivid sense of tragedy, an instinct for sarcasm, and developing it, elongating it, elevating it to a level of truly cosmic pretensions. Laughter is laughter, however biting.

Simple Gifts

Tis a gift to be crippled, tis a gift to be still

Tis a gift to sit right through the fire drill.

I crept down this morning and I sat on the stoop,

And I waited all day for some help to poop.

Sit then, you’re weaker than it seems,

My little prank will engulf all your dreams,

And I’ll hold you still when you want to flee,
For I am the Lord of the Joke you see.