My skeleton, my rival

Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton. It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it with me—this other thing I will become at death, and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk, my rival. What will the living see of me if they should open my grave but my bones that will stare at them through hollow sockets and bared teeth. I write this to warn my friends not to be shocked at my changed attitude toward them, but to be aware that I have it in me to be someone other than I am, and I write to ask forgiveness that death is not wholesome for friendships, that bones do not talk, have no quarrel with me, do not even know I exist. A machine called skeleton will take my place in the minds of others when I am dead among the living, and that machine will make it obvious that I have died to be identified by bones that have no speech, no thought, no mind to speak of having let themselves be carried once around in me, as at my service at the podium or as I lay beside my love or when I held my child at birth or embraced a friend or shook a critic's hand or held a pen to sign a check or book or wrote a farewell letter to a love or held my penis at the bowl or lay my hand upon my face at the mirror and approved of it. There is Ignatow, it will be said, looking down inside the open grave. I'll be somewhere in my poems, I think, to be mistaken for my bones, but There's Ignatow will be said. I say to those who persist, just read what I have written. I'll be there, held together by another kind of structure, of thought and imagery, mind and matter, love and longing, tensions opposite, such as the skeleton requires to stand upright, to move with speed, to sit with confidence, my friend the skeleton and I its friend, shielding it from harm.