21st Century Epitaph

How happy I would be

To be a prisoner

Of another skin.

Your body is not your own.

It is the captive of all skin

Not yet fossil and not yet flesh,

Not yet named and not yet born,

Not yet memory and not yet eternity.

Your body is yours only

When you pay for it 

With your warmest blood,

With all the peeling tissue

Of your wilting meat,

With all the naked terror

Of your writhing limbs,

And the trembling shape 

Of your tiny shadow. 

And I still remember it: 

Everywhere the ceremony of waste was screaming its song

In cathedrals of commerce and cruelty,

The soul of every animal listening to a world gone quiet,

Every insect now a spectator of their second death

As their loving hands broke my body like eucharist

And lowered it into this concrete carcass of a city,

They etched upon my tombstone an epitaph:

“Yesterday 

I lost both of my limbs,

But now I sleep with four.

I lost both of my antennae,

But now I am human.

I lost both of my wings,

But I’m still human.

What am I?”

And here you will find me,

Palms opened for the overcast sky,

The pavement bruising my knees,

Asking under human tears,

Under human breath:

“O god of loneliness,

How many times have I died here already?

How much of my life 

Will these years take from me?

How many years from my life 

Will this country take from me?

I will always be a stranger here,

Even in the closeness of it all,

I have only become 

A stranger to myself.

How happy I would be

To be a prisoner

Of another skin.

O god of loneliness,

I beg of thee:

Please

Let me be

A cockroach

Once 

Again.”

Cursed we are above all creatures

For wishing to be flesh in a world of apparitions.

Cursed we are above all creatures

For making offspring out of

Handfuls upon handfuls of dust. 

Cursed we are above all creatures

For worshipping the working day,

As we crawl out of our houses, 

Domiciles, and shelters, 

Public housing commissions,

And great ocean garbage patches,

Every suburb is a cemetery,

Every neighbourhood a catacomb,

Every building is a tomb,

Every room an unmarked grave.

Cursed we are above all creatures

For we know this to be true:

This is the end of all tomorrows,

All eternity has died for today.

Cursed I am above

Every breathing thing,

For I am forbidden fruit

Of forbidden seed,

For I am unknown skin

Of unknown breed,

For I am a child of exile

Waiting to be interred,

For flesh I am 

And to flesh

I will return.