you and your army of geriatric "friends," faces wrinkled, arthritic hands barely able to grasp your shovels and your hoes and your axes and your steel-tipped canes, barely able to fire your guns into the air, follow me through this half-lit, waterlogged tunnel, this endless tunnel that traverses the galaxy, going from light to darkness and then back to light again without pause, without explanation, without apology

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you and your cohorts, riding your skeletal bus, possessing neither wheels nor engine nor driver, encroaching upon me like a cancer while I take the reverse course, my limbs and organs growing younger with each passing second, growing stronger even as you howl and grind your decayed teeth, your hair falling out and leaving a trail of gray threads behind in the stinking pissandshit water below

yet do I grow healthier, yet do I return to my youthful days, yet do I, who have chosen (?) to take the reverse course, to "paddle upstream"...but my eyes are too sharp, my ears too keen, my systems—lymphatic, pulmonary, endocrine—too efficient, and now the light is too bright, this endless expansiveness propelling me backward toward my end/beginning too frightening, too uncertain to bear

you and your skeletal bus, rusted drool leaking from its underside, shit-brown, liver-spotted hands, hurling profanities at he (at me!) who hurtles now toward the light, at the one hurtling into the opposite direction which leads away from this world you have created and so stubbornly maintain, now slicing away pieces of your own bodies even as you talk about how unfairly it has treated you

about how it has made you who and what you are:

(you were told you didn't have a choice, you were told this was how it was, how it always is, how it will always be, and you were, of course, absolutely right)

you were right, and as for me, as my skin now becomes as supple as when I was a babe, my skull as soft as an overripe melon, my eyes and ears and mouth fallen completely open, struck stupid, I know I must return to the world, to your world, before it is too late, before this skeletal bus has decayed and fallen apart, leaving me behind here, all alone, to seek out the milk of God's great teat

you and your cronies have got me now, got me good, this shovel fits my already-callused white hand well, my voice is already hoarse, my ears already deaf, I'd like to fire the gun, I'd like to get that one there, that one right over there taking the reverse course, for it seems that s/he has drifted too far and I cannot wait any longer, I need to feel as if I've taken an active role in fulfilling my destiny