Silvery tears pour down my cheeks
I was being cleansed
Baptized
Reborn
The cavity in my chest felt, felt,
Not empty anymore
Instead
I was filled with purple velvet
My chest swelling and padded
With fresh cotton and plush cushion
Full, gauzy flesh.
But deeper
It was still there
It won't go
I know it won't
And as long as It's there
I can't be here
I'll float above the body
A stranger made itself home in my body
I can hear it's wails
Like the weeping woman of the river...
But I am baptizing myself
No longer putting flowers in someone else's house
I am baptizing myself
I stand under a rain
Who is this stranger?
I hear myself
My eyes are swollen shut from the storm out there
On the creased pads of my fingertips
Is engraved a tale
Seared into the white meat of my palms
Black incisions.
Like a scrap of paper crumpled once
Smoothed down
Then crumpled again
Words blurring and lines mismatched.
I am baptizing myself.
My body striped and fringed
Sewn together
A sack of woven flesh
But I will be born anew
Shed my skin
Blacken and cripple in writhing flames.
Break through the shell,
Powder myself in bone dust.
Drink wine from a fractured skull.
That stranger in that place
The one whose name I have forgotten
I wonder sometimes
If they be as deaf as I.
I have glimpsed this stranger.
Can you hear me?
She wears my face
but hers is cold
And waxy
as if it be a porcelain mask
to hide the burn scars
that linger on her infant skin
and when it is night again
a night ever dark and silent
I hear her wails
the wails of a weeping woman.
It is cold
But I like the coldness
I am baptizing myself
Under this coldness
Under this forever rain
The burning basalt inside me quiets
And I can hear
I can hear over the unforgiving deafness.
My screams will be heard along the puckered edges of my closed throat.
I don't want to not hear again
I like hearing
I like listening to myself
I like listening
As I am born anew.
The stranger claims to protect me
She touched me once
Now my limbs are turning
to porcelain
My mind to wax
My heart to plastic
Stiffen the body, harden the blood
Stiffen the body, harden the blood.
No, no, no,
Because I am baptizing myself
I shed this wax and I burn this veil.
I am baptizing
I am baptizing.
I waded out of the salt of a mother's tears.
I rose from the grave no one left flowers in.
I am baptizing myself
Because the stranger at home
Can hear me
I have drilled a hole through the flesh of my neck
The stranger will hear me
And I will scream
Scream until all of the sap has seeped from the withering bark of the tree
I will scream.
And when all that is left of me
Is blue flesh
I will rise again
From the numinous gold
I'll be reborn
Baptize myself in the redness that lingers beneath my flesh
Rise a rosy babe
Under the curtain of caliginosity.
I will see you there, stranger. You hide there, I know you do. You fear me, I know you do.
I will find you one day.
Until then...
