caretaker

make a list, give it numbers, bullets.

how many times

have I been asked

by a therapist

to catalog my values.

to be here exercising them 

in what doesn't feel like a choice

yawns at what I'd said aloud 

to someone in that opposite, paid chair.

had you told me then

years ago, so young and absurd,

about all the yesses

and all the nos

that would become what this now is,

I would've known better what love 

would look like

at midlife

but still wouldn't have been prepared 

for what being brutally needed 

would so intimately 

ask of me.