the religion of this.

Tell me how it feels to be looked at like that. When your paint is so dramatic, eyes step beyond the taped line. Risk of getting thrown out of museum is worth it just to see that tiny hair– trapped for one hundred and eighty years– caught up in lonely greens and browns. Contemplate how that human called your body’s origin: a violin. What are your parents. What color are you if I dripped you open. We can be allegories on this earth as everything in sight tilts toward our fright. Let’s pretend we only just started to exist. They called my blood stained glass, bent fingers into each other, prayed toward my carbon dioxide. Today, I give away four tablespoons of urine to analyze all the haunts that have ghosted their way in. What is so spiritual about discharge. Owls and graveyards and ruin and I dreamed I had to explain why my wrists have blurred. How to mute the dread of tomorrow, which reeks of the day before and the one which will arrive two days from now. And taciturn and monsoon’d. There is a motif for prayer and it looks like a four-stringed instrument & curled voice of poet pretending how to live. Wonder about monks. Wonder how to rely upon four minute allowance of dress and razor and mercy and water strainer and needle. Wonder how to practice abstinence of appetite, while abstaining from all practices of celibacy. And if one cannot be holy in its intimate form, how to be a hummingbird.  Forage shade as though it can be eaten and when all of it is gone, sleep inside the orthodoxy of dark.

atheist puddle dweller or whispered scar collector

If I were to call my body an atheist, would that mean there was nothing left on my skin to question or believe. If I used the metaphor of a thousand cardboard boxes broken down and hushed into plastic bags as my body, would that be enough to visualize. How about a lost hitchhiker jumping on the back of metal and bumps, curled into corner against window trying to invision a way out of itself.

We have begun to name snowstorms and I wonder if we do this to place blame on something that slows down our day, freezes up our bent parts and throws us down. When it melts, ice forms or puddles and now that I have boots made by Canadian prisoners, I stomp in them. There is no fear left when protection is worn.

But what happens when entire body is a puddle and there is no costume or uniform to defend oneself from the splash.

Notice the reflection of Wednesday in that spilt body. Or the aggression of oil swirled in like leaked rage. Notice the blemishes; try to medicate it away or stomp it into something less dimensional.

I have been dwelling inside this construction site called body for over three decades or maybe more than that but what I remember can only fit inside a plastic bag big enough for a meal of rushed bites. Others are pushing for an explanation of how this puddle got like this or why it insists on exchanging shapes (sometimes) or why it used to welcome stranger’s punches and soiled footprints but now but now but now it needs to grant permission.

Or….

Perhaps my body is more like a near-sighted mountain lion: roar of genders and fur, sharp-toothed poetics and agility. Does any of this even matter.

Here is how it ends: set fire to body to see what part you (choose) to save first.

[what remains is what existed all along]