body work

xxiii: [iii]

**tw's blood mention, trauma, birth & death mention, nightmares**

@ 7: having perfected the act of silencing, my tongue weakens with disuse. still, i try to strengthen it. my hair is dark.

@ 11: & now, with having the eyes to match; my clothes rarely fit. i first heard about death when my mother spoke of my birth.

@ 14: i am not yet accustomed to liberty. i do not want to be. i fear both blood & the bleed for the first time. i feel medusa in my veins, the hiss & spark of the venom, i think i become the venom. i think i become.

two decades later & i was never really born. i just sort of slipped out & have been slipping ever since. i pack up memories like arsenal & are you ready for the battle now?

i have thoughts of surviving winters without a bed, of turning gold to dust & becoming whole again. i have nightmares i dream of you.
& you never change: always the well to my wallowing, the echo to my cough. the world becomes a shark & you are its bite & i am the bait. this is always the same.

some days i do not speak, let alone at the right time. the starch & hack of a throat/rope lies unscaled. forever, i last. i last

laughed yesterday & don't remember what it feels like to laugh.
& is this the norm, to forget the punch before it hits? to become so quiet, each breath is a siren & no words ever fit?

i am all tongue & no speech & i
only visualise trauma. i've been stripped clean, scraped raw.
this is me revitalised: wolfen & lupined, pining.
with a tooth edge all ready to break off, where to be fed
is to be housed in a purge of the real self.

i spend these years festering happenings so pure that
they do not fear the drain of the moment.
i cannot bear the feel again / to fall into that vestibule of i-don't-know's &

all i know is
i was seven years old when i perfected the art of silencing &
i haven't perfected anything since.