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An animal before he is a man, Sisyphus carries the rock on his shoulders,
lays it down on the medi-plinth.
Giving until gone, he is a priority specimen
for the secret doctors underneath stadium seats,
something about pith and oxidation.
The roar of the crowd can’t remember whether up or down means
he will be crushed under the weight of his own inability to figure out
which notebook he wrote that phone number in,
something about an oil slick from the pores and in the syringe,
because there isn’t an answer.
He is sliding back down the hill and into the stream, hands and ankles up.
Filling and emptying, pushing and pulling, he exaggerates himself, thinking about rot,
decomposition as a way of life. He is justifying his means of immortality
on the grounds that peridot is fake, because periwinkle is a construct,
and one cannot circle without accelerating inward. He is reaching upward,
but keeps hitting the underside of the rink.
He hears a ringing that could render him invisible.
Sisyphus sits in the bathroom longer than he needs to, swallowing time, which is space.
Surely he is facing the door by now, but his worst is not the worst.