Vestigial Flexing

With these tiny words
trickling over my skin,
these pithy lines I draw and scratch,
in my head from tucked deep in bed,
in broad strokes that spasm and spark-
streaking in wisps that leave light trails,
I am comforted and swaddled
by my brittle skin that knows these
are the strands that connect my spirit
to its terminal boundaries.
This is how I speak to me.
I say to hear, I think to find
the same self, tucked in amid
its ways of saying untranslatable
and delectable daunting poetry.

The heavy blanket protects me from
exposure- you cannot see more
than the shape of naked, the outline
is enough for some, sameness...
There is That, This is I, There, There.
I've found just
in another beating heart
that echoes
Thou art That-
Art Thou That?

I wonder, I think
it is warm around you too...
I must be closer to your world in words
or I am sleeping tight inside definitions
sweet dreams, where these words want me
passionately and privately
for their own subversive desires...
I listen intensely and densely rapt-
catching any waves of sound
that may keep me afloat, on the
shiny surface of sonorous daylight
hours, too conscious to care
any more to day.




Image of painting by Alexey Gavrilovich Venetsianov, Sleeping Girl, 1840 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.