The body keeps a different kind of time.
Not the clock on the nightstand, blinking twelve,
nor the calendar’s neat squares I cross off
with a pen that bleeds through to the next page.
No, this time is measured in the small rituals:
the way I still turn my back to the wall in a crowd,
how a certain cologne in an elevator
is a fist around my throat, not a scent.
I became a curator of small violences.
There is the ache in my left hip, where I
pressed myself into the backboard, trying to become
the grain of the wood, invisible, a map of nothing.
There is the way my hands still hover,
mid-air, over the rim of a glass,
as if waiting for permission to exist.
I have catalogued each one, a miser with his coins.
I was keeping my old wounds fresh as evidence for a trial that would never come.
I would wash them, these souvenirs, with surgical precision.
In the shower’s steam, I’d press the bruise that bloomed
like a watercolor on my thigh, watching the colors change---
purple to violet to a sickly yellow-green---
as if its fading was a lie I needed to correct.
I’d rehearse the testimony into my pillow at 3 a.m.,
a script so polished it shone, detailing the geography
of his hands, the precise arithmetic of my own adolescent frame
pinned beneath the weight of a word I was too polite to scream.
For years, I was a courtroom with no jury.
A gavel I held, only to set back down.
I built a case so airtight, so full of evidence,
it became a prison. The plaintiff and the defendant
and the jailer were all me. And you,
you who asked, “Are you still thinking about that?”
as if it were a grudge I was choosing,
you saw the scars I’d picked at and called it
not holding up well. I called it being ready.
But a trial that will never come is just an empty bench,
the judge’s robe a dark flag of surrender.
And what is evidence, if no one is sworn in?
A collection of relics for a religion with no god.
So this is the harder verdict: to let the wounds heal.
To watch the last of the yellow fade from my thigh
and not feel I am betraying myself.
To delete the script from my phone’s notes, line by line,
and call it not forgetting, but laying down my sword.
It is the slow, deliberate act of setting down
the heavy case I carried, walking out
of the courthouse I built, and letting the sun
warm the unbruised, unproven skin of my face,
finally a witness to my own becoming.
Apr 5
Apr 5, 2026 at 5:26 PM UTC
The body keeps a different kind of time.
Not the clock on the nightstand, blinking twelve,
nor the calendar’s neat squares I cross off
with a pen that bleeds through to the next page.
No, this time is measured in the small rituals:
the way I still turn my back to the wall in a crowd,
how a certain cologne in an elevator
is a fist around my throat, not a scent.
I became a curator of small violences.
There is the ache in my left hip, where I
pressed myself into the backboard, trying to become
the grain of the wood, invisible, a map of nothing.
There is the way my hands still hover,
mid-air, over the rim of a glass,
as if waiting for permission to exist.
I have catalogued each one, a miser with his coins.
I was keeping my old wounds fresh as evidence for a trial that would never come.
I would wash them, these souvenirs, with surgical precision.
In the shower’s steam, I’d press the bruise that bloomed
like a watercolor on my thigh, watching the colors change---
purple to violet to a sickly yellow-green---
as if its fading was a lie I needed to correct.
I’d rehearse the testimony into my pillow at 3 a.m.,
a script so polished it shone, detailing the geography
of his hands, the precise arithmetic of my own adolescent frame
pinned beneath the weight of a word I was too polite to scream.
For years, I was a courtroom with no jury.
A gavel I held, only to set back down.
I built a case so airtight, so full of evidence,
it became a prison. The plaintiff and the defendant
and the jailer were all me. And you,
you who asked, “Are you still thinking about that?”
as if it were a grudge I was choosing,
you saw the scars I’d picked at and called it
not holding up well. I called it being ready.
But a trial that will never come is just an empty bench,
the judge’s robe a dark flag of surrender.
And what is evidence, if no one is sworn in?
A collection of relics for a religion with no god.
So this is the harder verdict: to let the wounds heal.
To watch the last of the yellow fade from my thigh
and not feel I am betraying myself.
To delete the script from my phone’s notes, line by line,
and call it not forgetting, but laying down my sword.
It is the slow, deliberate act of setting down
the heavy case I carried, walking out
of the courthouse I built, and letting the sun
warm the unbruised, unproven skin of my face,
finally a witness to my own becoming.
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