If you find me in a coma, please don't shave my beard.

I feel like a bag of dicks right now. 

Like I'm trapped in a damp Aldi bag 

with other people who may never please someone again.

Right now I'm two-hundred feet in the air

and black dots move around below me 

like Etch-a-Sketch dust:

clumps and circles connecting lines

making angles. 

In the air 

but looking through windows.

Through four distinct panes of 

yellowing glass.

When I look outside, my window is 

a jersey-knit black sheet 

with barking dogs and a woman dragging 

a full trash can behind it.

I can listen to everything like its nothing

when it is something,

even if it's a magazine with

smudge pages, 

or someone's photograph of strangers

or a sketch of some bridge with cars

parked bumper-to-bumper,

making industrial noise.

Fuel fumes. Metal tips

belch petroleum clouds

into circling cylinders.

Still black outside.

Shih Tzus chattering teeth

and pawing at grass damp

with sagging clouds. 

Inside a black room

anything could be written on the wall.

The wall could be painted any color,

the writing could be any color

and when you sleep,

I can imagine you paying tiny men

to paint the inside of your eyelids

so they could be any color but black.

So when you find me asleep somewhere:

at work in the breakroom with my head

pressed on a printer manual.

With my apron untied and pens at my feet.

With my boss rubbing my shoulder

the way my mother rubs shoulders,

you can just let me sleep.

A coma, sure. A coma.

Sometimes they're fine.

Man-made coma to avoid pain

from extreme injury.

Please pretend I was thrown from a horse

or had something inside my heart grow

into a colony of bad things

and those bad things traveled 

with small tank treads

through my veins

into the back of my eyes.

The tank treads pushing hair follicles

out of my cheeks, and into the shapes

and textures of bird nests in the beginning of fall.

You can ask all you want

Can you hear me?,

in order to gauge my consciousness.

Or wipe the drool from my lips,

or rotate my lifeless body to

rid my thighs and hips of red sores.

Just don't shave the only sign of life

I have.