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
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.