The Silent Cup

My doctor has three poisoned chalices for me to drink from today.
One tells the truth, the other always lies.
The third is totally silent.

I am the blindfolded damsel in the battle of wits,
only that’s not true, really,
because she’s given me a map
of what I might encounter along the way:
a bear at the first turn in the road, a strange man at the crossroads,
and a fearsome beast at the end of the line.

When this is all over, and I tally up
my cures and venoms along with my goods and evils,
it will measure a life well lived, another painfully cut short,
or one endured for years in agony.
I have to guess this sum before I can begin the journey,
and I am a child at school again, 
following a nonsense arithmetic
written for me by others. Here there be dragons.

If I drink, I die. If I drink, I live.
A logical fallacy when A ≠ A,
contingent on the self never ending
when it must, if and only if
I can pull back the little needle and the big needle 
into something like an embrace, or a handshake on a deal
to buy myself more time.

They will pry up my floorboards
down to the very skeleton
and say I still belong to Theseus.
I am both alive and dead,
and I’ve spent years building up an immunity
to delayed diagnoses, venipuncture pricks,
radioactive imaging.

I drain the silent cup.