Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. -Roland Barthes
My* language is a skin I have outgrown. It sloughs off in flakes, leaving letters or the occasional ill-suited, illegible word trailing behind me.
I pick at adverbs and articles hanging from my fingertips; This morning I pulled a whole phrase off my arm like a sunburn.
My language, once alight, now settles like cinders on the ground, around the shower drain, upon my sheets; My language no longer serves me.
Peel my vocabulary off my back, tear my diction from my shoulders, and my syntax from my chest; Scratch the punctuation off my face— my lips are chapped with parentheses.
Tomorrow I will have shed my language— Unbound from an ill-fitting lexicon— coughed the alphabet from my lungs and exhaled the last serif like cigarette smoke to find the world new, uncontained and undefined.
In addition to Roland Barthe, Margaret Atwood's "You Begin" contributed to the original idea behind this poem.