How easy it is to forget your torso
That it doesn’t bend like the rest of your limbs
Too easy to remain rigid, fixed
To let that stuck and stagnant place that feels like a stone hand gripping grip you between your shoulder blades, throwing you, as if you were a puppet
A sense of sickness since you can only be animated by this, or rather, no - I am still me - but this contrary will seeps through my spine and holds me fixed, torn
Pulled in two
(Deer in the headlights aren’t frozen from fear, they’re held static, being pulled in two directions at once,
the twin impulses to move forwardsand backwards.)
It is a small feat to be able to rock
Let alone bend
Letalone twist, braided, and set fire to your ends so smoke pours fourth from them, can you imagine?
The sheer genius of it, the transcendence, to contort like smoke!
As it is now, I can only force pain into that place - this tells me there’s a foreign body lodged there,
And that is in a way a small comfort, to be haunted
To put a finger on the missing, to reason it as apart not a part of you
Yes! To denounce it!
We would be smoke without it!
A sweet and smooth flame,
Clean, pure, wild, bright, hot, and capable
Of decimating
Anything
In its path.
This is our meant-to-be core, and our meant-to-be limbs and torso are tendrils of vaporous ash
Rising spectral in the space around us,
Now a part of it, now moving gracefully at the slightest whim of the earth we are again a limb, a lash of,
Instead of being ham-strung strung up on marionette strings and shoved full of someone else’s body and wishing, at least, to feel it.