How to be Hit

forget there's another person in the room,
forget there's a room

turn into a naked animal
in the desert outside Jerusalem,
outside Las Vegas, in the flower
bed outside your mother's house

feel your skin burn as if
you lie under boiling water
in an old pink bathtub

forget how to open your eyes,
how to use your tongue, hear
someone breathing louder, louder

hear your mother yelling
somewhere downstairs,
calling you for pancakes
though she's been dead for a decade

be five years old, curled in the dirt
under your favorite swimming pool,
be ten years old, beaned in the face
with a fastball and knocked to the grass,

stare at the sun without your glasses
and don't blink, even as the pain
reaches through your retina to your brain stem,
even as the sky goes black