You mourn the body
you once inhabited.
Your caged heart pumps blood-laced
life into the air;
it lingers
and clings—
before all is melted away:
delicate snowfall fades as temperatures rise once again.
For such beauty and light and love
are ephemeral, after all.
You mourn the brain you used to find
a home in.
Familiarity.
Control.
Control.
Control.
Your soul is a mystical being,
a shapeshifter, playful and effervescent
and cheekily amorphous.
But lately she is
stagnant.
She is slow, impatient,
restrictive, gluttonous.
She has morphed into something
unrecognisable to you,
something sinister and well meaning,
she has crept.
Unknown and unfamiliar, she is
blunted and numbed and muted and dulled and faded.
Your soul––she hides inside your body.
A leech that turns and falters and
h a e m o r r h a g e s.
The mirror fills itself,
like a photograph discovered long after those it holds have passed;
with worn edges and a
discoloured face.
(Why do you not know yourself anymore?)
Do not worry.
A sting of nostalgia lasts only a second before it is swallowed
by grief.
A pile of muscle fibres and nerve endings and layers of skin and fat
and a loose and disorganised bag of organs
(Are they all yours?
Are any of them yours?)
and some raw and exposed bone,
knotted limbs,
necrosing flesh.
But none of it seems to know who it is meant to be,
what it is meant to be.
Is it too late to be more than a collection of wasted potential?
Or has your soul decomposed her host from the inside out?
Does that make her a parasite?
As she erodes, she takes pieces of your flesh with her,
gnawing on your skin,
fibrous tendons caught in her teeth,
until she eats away to the bone.
She would suck the marrow out if she had the chance.
Maybe she already has.
