I swallowed my lunch down the wrong way
and now there’s something in my lungs,
eggs, I think, cracked into little pieces
with the shells all picked out.
I really should have known when I couldn’t breathe
that I was doing this backwards,
but I swallowed anyway, and now when I hyperventilate
it’s like my body is trying to make an omelette.

It sounds so funny. It sounds like everybody
but me is laughing. I mean, it’s a ridiculous idea,
having eggs in your lungs,
but the more I think it’s true, the more I feel them.

I suppose this is divine punishment
for the impossible crime of eating lunch,
for taking those eggs and cracking them straight
into my mouth. There are probably some unborn
chicks thinking, in as much as chicks can think
like we do, that this is divine punishment.
Who gets the last laugh? The abortion does.

And now I’m on the table — medical, not,
you know, the dinner one,
and the doctors are saying that they’re going to cut
something out of me to keep me alive.
If it weren’t for the fact that my mouth
has been sewed up to prevent my own idiocy,
I’d tell them that that’s what I’ve been trying to do all along.

I waterfall my fingers down my throat
and wriggle them like they’re alive,
like I’m nineteen years old again,
trying to prove that I’m the cool girl
with no gag reflex.

The shower runs on boiling hot
and if I stand, I might fall,
so I’m taking the hair-infested plughole
as my date to the dance,
once I’m done with the black hole left in its absence.

My fingers are uncomfortably water-warm
and if I close my eyes, it feels so good,
like the first time I realised there was a clenched fist
inside my stomach that I could begin
to uncurl.

When I think about it, it’s like *******.
It’s something I wouldn’t talk about in Church
and it’s something I should only do behind closed doors.
A lot of things are like *******, in that way,
like being gay, and cutting my own hair, and whatever this is.

It’s a distraction.
It’s something to do when the list of things to be done
is the same every day, when the doors are perpetually
shut and the clenched fist will always be clenched
once rigor mortis has set in.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a worm inside my mind,
I hear it, when it’s nighttime, it has a voice
and that voice tells me to turn my body four times
so that everyone I love doesn’t leave me.

More than that, though, I feel it
right at the back of my skull. It nestles
deep inside and chokes the blood flow away
from rationality, and I clench my fist two times two.

And then it uncurls. I think it is wounded
but it is really just gorging on the compulsion
I have fed it. Again. But the reprieve is glorious
for a moment, until its maw opens back up for more.

Its body is a spiral, contorting thoughts
until I am at its mercy; although it is part of me,
I feel as though I am part of it.
It’s impossible to run away from an attached body.

One day, everyone you love will die and it will be your fault,
ballet turn, pivot, dance en pointe my darling, again,
walk, walk, walk, walk, there we go, now people are alive.
Now you’re a hero, for a second, for two.

Here we are in the thick of it.

Oh, you didn’t like that, did you?

Almost like clockwork,
the bone breaks. This time,
an arm, a warning
against the things that hands
can do. Cut it off not at the disease,
but at the root.

We hope, this time,
that we were quick enough
in the amputation.
That the disease has spread
no further than the floor
upon which the phantom limb jerks.

Last time, it was slow,
an infestation below the muscle
until the patient was screaming
for morphine. We had to cut
the lower leg first, but the thigh
was already prisoner.

The neuroscience department
has been working overtime
on all the brains we lobotomised
before removal. We’re thinking
that’s where it ruminates,
dormant, like a volcano.

The infection manifests
differently in everyone.
In some, it cries for attention,
and we cut the throat.
In others, it’s violence,
and it ends up killing itself.

There’s not much we know
and even less we can name.
When they brought my body
in, they called it loneliness,
and cut out my heart.
The wolves ate well that night.

The body peels itself
away from the floorboards,
sweat, sticky and slick,
pops like a gunshot
as the skin pulls loose.

Shoulder blades pulsate
as movement returns
once more. “It’s been
a hell of a night,”
the heavy arms creak.

Even in the dark of the room,
the body can sense morning;
the dew on the legs, the cool
floorboards are warming
with the dawn.

There’s something here
about a beginning.
The body
pulls at the skin
and it is still attached —

Meaning, of course,
that the body is a body
once more. Meaning,
of course, that the beginning
has already begun.

Blue ocean, sleepless tides
Under the surface
An endless well
Ringing out wedding bells

Holy matrimony, red rose ribbon
Beware the trap
Low-class living
Madman skips the system

Broken road, remote
Is not alone
Endless river, always some place to go
When I is all I own

Hope here is dead. Man in a box, Cobain in my head.
Court me some love and spin on my throne,
Of brittle remorse.

Sick in the womb, the silver spoon pollutes.
Tiny tadpole in the pool, grows to patrol the Black Lagoon.
Devouring the newt it once knew.

Fearful men, conceal their worries, in tall tales of courage.
Ironclad, Iconoclast. Kings and heroes alike,
Plant their flags in fields of ash.

At night when troubles themselves seem to weep
The rest comes hard and never deep
Sounds in the dark break the dream
Slick and stuck in tangled web
Trapped mid slumber and thick in head
The figure stands with burning eyes
Writhing closer that empty gaze
The scream won't form
My mind ablaze
Close enough to taste her breath
A burst of speed
I free my hand
Vanishing fast
And nothing left
Now alone
A stammering mess
Back to rest
This hard fought test
Watching in the corners still
The darkness shimmers
For one more thrill