: tomb

i am swollen & blue.

selfish istration of my natural response:

fight the emptiness bursting through the crack

of my voice, flee from the tedious scraping of

rock to find little bits of history that's supposed

to already be mine / my rights are sacred but the

tomb has been enclosed around them, my nails

are up against the slab of stone, and i throw the

fossilized remains of my ancestors at it, i bleed

as the wind billows / the animal within me cries

out for reinstitution. it wants the body conscious-

ness & morality claimed. it wants its tongue back,

to peal the guttural pleas that don't think of

verb or subject. it wants its limbs back, that can

find the places miles along the coast & cliffs,

that have not grown soft & weak from tires & gas.

it wants its brain back, that does not think

of art or philosophy or history, but only knows

it has to survive, survive like the parasite it is

inside the skull. it wants to start over, from

the first expansion, as hydrogen goes to helium,

goes to lithium, goes to beryllium, [...] goes to me /

and i do not want to have a concept of the self

or i will go mad again.

but at last, i freeze, the final response. i am

unfathomably stupid.

i unglue the tongue and laugh, give a prayer

that has verb & subject in its order, use my soft

limbs to move away from the tomb, and

began to string vowels & consonants in my

brain, the putrid mass of art & philosophy &

history, to establish what was already decided

centuries before my birth. i am in a criminalized

body, my sense of being relies on the others,

but the rights inside the grave are mine.

as long as i am willing to die for it,

to be laid to rest next to it,

curled up like an animal.

#marchprompt9

image not mine