A wood-panelled room consumed
By habitual noise and ochre
As the sounds of rain seep through layers
Of wall and building
Until the wood itself is
Expanding and contracting
Over and over again
Like a march of a distant army
Approaching to conquer me
Like it always does.
.
And I am blanketed in cloths, becoming
Shapeless under it all.
Still, I am somehow shivering.
.
The faintest trails
Of moonlight peek through
A gap just out of reach.
I can dream the details
Of my hand,
My body,
Without truly seeing, like always
.
I begin to touch myself all over.
My hands tracing the soft issue,
Marching across valleys and hills,
Looking for my bones,
For my muscles,
And then finally my fat.
.
I am a god, shaping myself,
Molding out of celestial clay a
Form through the darkness.
Form from formlessness.
Beauty bestowed on the banal.
Shape shot through shapelessness.
.
And as my fingers carve my body,
I imagine an outline that’s prettier.
And when I think like this,
I like to touch my boniest parts, the parts I cannot fix:
My collarbone,
My hips,
My wrists,
My knees,
Until I’ve run out.
Trace and trace
And trace and trace.
And in the morning,
I’ll make sure that I give myself
More parts to trace at night,
Growing the prolificity of my skeleton.
.
After, I will stare at my water-stained ceiling,
Revealing time spent and lost.
Think how
It’s so weird that everything is becoming,
How all I wish is to freeze time, to have
Some forever stillness
Where everyone is alone again,
Put back in some prelapsarian womb,
Existence erased.
.
I miss warmth.
My fingertips lose sense
As the feeling falls to a fleeting temporality.
Sensation:
.
A memory too distant to place.
And when I get like this,
I become cold and ceaselessly empty.
So, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
