Body

my hair, slick and

greased with hallucinations of

last night. It slides from the flakes of

my scalp to the scales of my shoulder

and the gaping plane of my peeling back. See

my limbs turn pale and placid as they, too, slip

and stumble out of place and seep into the soil. Some say

I am just a torso, gripped by the earth beneath me

and incapable of expression—no words come from my flapping tongue

enamel and dentine tumbling out of my mouth, teeth striking into the dirt

writing secret codes that have meaning in the steeled cage

of my mind but cannot be made to make sense in the sphere of

“real”

So I sit

(if that’s what you’d like to call it)

in the realm of my own design and drip nerves and bleed arteries and

slop skin cells. My eyes remain rooted to my optic nerve and my brain

continues to flip the images so I bring them into myself but I can’t

see the reversal occurring—and teeth try to clench

but it turns into flapping gums and dribbling platelets.

you think

it’s helpful to point and poke and prod and stare