Somatics

The heat in your chest,
is there heat in your chest?
What about your feet now?
And now your fingers?
Is there sensation?
Can you locate the feeling?
The future is wet feet
and the past is wet feet
and my knees sink
into my toes.

My body is recreating the past,
sewing its shedding skin
back onto itself;
shadowing a felt symmetry,
an inevitable eventuality,
a song I was born singing.

I gently pick at the stiff seams of yellowed leather,
the hardened sheets curling over skin more supple,
because determinism is dirt
and I want to wipe myself clean
but I can still feel and see it
caked in lines along
fingerprints
under layers of husk.

I utilize nervous habits:
biting nails,
splitting skin
to let the filth in.

What if the location is outside of the body?

I can locate the feeling.
I’m calm
and spacing out,
demonstrating death like a killdeer
to save the youngest part of myself.

Distracting you from the body.

I’m a sea cucumber
coughing up its guts,
a sleight of hand survival mechanism.

I’m considering the inky cap
who fruits and immediately starts to rot.

Can you locate the feeling in your body?

What I mean to say is that
Some bodies take advantage of disaster.

When the thunder strikes
and your heart calls out to the storm
where is the origin?
How old were you?
Who hurt you?

Then come back to yourself
to be unheld,
to be unholding
to make room
to fit your tiny body
in the palm
of your own hand.

Do you have enough food and water?
Have you had adequate sleep?

The universe does not care
and it is not sorry.

An indifferent planet
sounds like
the slow whisper of barnacles,
winter waves pounding the shore,
the hiss of seed pods splitting and spreading in the heat,
your anger as the underside of dignity
a dignified understory
in the wake of a fire.

My bones vibrate in anticipation,
sense a ghost,
and I get good grief.
We play in this space
ages apart
and constantly meet.