Sucker on a Wheeled Chair

This second
is the first chance you'll have since then
to reconnect and begin again.
Pick up your pride and pull it tight
about your lips, so pretty and thin,
like a pillow and breathe it in.
It'll kill you like cigarettes,
slowly stealing your very last breath,
and when you inhale the last of it,
you have a second to begin again.
Bend your knees at your waist,
at your shoulders, at you neck and your eyelids,
and kneel down for the softness of the carpets.
Spit that swallowed pride aside
like little bits of sunflower shells.
This second
chance brought to you not by happenstance,
but deliberate deliverance.

Oh, but I, so high on my office chair,
standing, commanding,
slide my own pride about neck,
a tidy collar, so wide and innocent?
Oh, how quickly I forget,
the wheels on this chair, and how my collar connects
to the banister, and becomes the noose
I hang myself with.