Sometimes there aren’t enough medications in the world

A poem about being an imperfect person in an imperfect world , because sometimes I cheat and use the language of poetry when I cannot otherwise capture my experience.

Sometimes there aren’t enough medications in the world
To contain both gratitude and pain,
The way that grace explodes into the world, unexpected;
To breathe in slower breaths, surprised, another token of hope,
Of God, not somewhere in the world, but here, and now, and beautiful;
To join with me in the struggles, where shards of unmet expectations cut,
Having poured out and out and bled and still more demanded;
To be someone else, more perfect, some memory of some other,
To be a fiction for conversation around coffee and stale doughnuts,
And only if, then to be a disappointment still.
And there is some small part of me that longs to tack upon the wall
Those sins for all to see,
To shame. To shame in indignation and loose my pain upon the world.
And I am not proud of that.
In healing there is no gentleness, but itch and scab and scar.
To think how far, but in truth a stone’s throw from the past.
But that is the distance between life and death.