My Resting Heart Rate

MY RESTING HEART RATE IS 42 BPM

I keep having these I’m tired, my heart rate is too slow

in - and - out kind of moments, like vertigo, no,

but not like sexual but maybe more rotational

but either way reminding me of Bataille.

Like maybe I could have a heart attack

even though I’m on beta blockers except all the time,

or for prolonged periods. Days.

Whose arm is that?

Mine. It’s in front of me.

Drinking a lot of diet pepsi but also chamomile tea,

can’t work up the courage to drink an actual coffee

like a real fucking adult running on 4 hours.

Can’t work up the courage to take too much xanax,

scared I might need more and more,

get used to to it, withdraw.

Something about how you only need something because you use it,

like chapstick or I want to say shampoo

but after not using it for so long or so seldomly

I now have dry red scalp and dandruff that doesn’t itch though

and now I don’t know if I shampoo enough or too little.

Head and shoulders dry scalp care with almond oil.

Pretty much all the symptoms of anxiety

are also the symptoms of all the shittiest ways you could die suddenly.

My very own Felix Gonzalez-Torrez hanging around the

who-the-fuck-knows-what-that’s-there-for piece of wood

screwed to the wall, drooping down,

not having been secured in any way like some impossibly dumb gaping smile.

That piece one of the only that has made cry,

dangling, descending onto a circular plinth, curling up around itself,

but I don’t cry when I walk into my apartment, no. Not even at night.

I cry along with Bas Jan because in those real situations

you don’t have to know the cause, there’s no psychology behind it,

just empathy.

Or companionship.

Across decades, only a few years less than half a century.

Almost as great as the distance he tried to travel. Almost as tired as me.

Almost as slow as my heart rate. In - and - out.

Around - and - Around.