I curse my body daily.
Waking up with the sky, my tongue
lashes red sunrises onto my thighs,
my lungs vacuum a familiar
poisonous plume. Oh!
the relief of mortality!
the sturdy promise of decay!
An ancient blood pact with the moon
turns me sour at her zenith,
and I slink down in my weather-torn coffin
smirking with anticipation.
Crashing waves of maggots pour
over and through me,
shaving away this amorphous effigy
to dust, debris.
Released back to the soil,
soaked in dew,
reformed in clumps by absent-minded shoes,
bled dry by stelliferous roots of sycamores -
my body giving birth to life
in ways I never could before,
in ways only revealed to me
by death
the spurious specter becomes pure again.