SHEDDING

It was not rebirth written
Into the laboured breath
Of the sloughed skin,
But the seven doors
Of Ereshkigel’s realm con
tracting, teasing tensions into
Inanna’s nakedness
I too was being stripped
And as the dust of depleted DNA
Clung to my eyebrows it
Clogged each flustered follicle
Until pustules poured the pattern
Of who I might have been
Da Vinci would have drawn me
As a shade of humanlike
Kafka’s creatures courting inclusion

The physician forewarned
That my body would consume
Its own heart if I continued
This diet of penance and toxic fumes
But still I emptied
C3H8O by the hour onto
The face I was erasing

And as I scrubbed with cotton bud
The slurry of selves stretched
Over a frame of diverse lives
I counted the fading cadence
Of indiscernible endings replicated

The theory of an underactive
Preorbital cortex was tattooed on
The vellum of a wasted life
Rational observers questioned:
Can’t she see her own potential?
But Jocasta’s brooch was in a bottle
So I bought blindness for my [birth]day
In splitting the perverse caduceus
Tiresias was transformed, not eye
Washing away the final barrier
With the milk-white tears of the
Snake before it slips into the new

In releasing the imprint of each
Irreplicable scale I knew
I would not have a skin beneath
To conceal the knotted muscle
In its obstinate rhythm

updated by @whyt-pugh: 11/24/19 06:16:51PM