It was pretty touch and go
for a while, there.
There was a month
I was fairly close to dead,
figuratively.
I was getting out of bed
getting out of the house
but with nowhere to go
no reason to be.

I was a ghost
haunting my own life.
It felt pointless.

It wasn’t even wretched.
It didn’t reach that level of dysfunction.
It was some kind of toxic emasculinity,
I was just wandering through.

I was chameleon-close to the rest of you,
but was something else there,
as I struggled with my zombie-existence.
It was rough.

I wish I could have said something
while the spell was cast.
Maybe I could have gotten some help.
Maybe you could have helped me break it.
But probably it always had to be
something I did on my own.