Pre/Post

Ripping between the seams

It hurts, it hurts

It's too late, insides spilling

Are already festering, infectious

Pulling the ropes of intestines

Stomach, kidneys, heart

Green with mold

Into the dirt

Only the black lungs remain

Shrunken and shuddering to breathe

Slow Down

An hourglass filled with smoke

Beats spaced farther apart

Lukewarm, still

A reverie from nothing at all

Slow, it's all slowing down

A piece, you found a piece

As blood cooled in your veins

You lay, and you dream

Is

For months, for as long as you have been conscious, the gulls descend to eat you.  Open to the sky, you watch them root and pull and swarm and swallow.  You understand why they do it.  It's only natural.  But you hate them.

Compression

Sucking air through a pinhole from inside a sealed jar

The Swells

It's high tide as they leave you on the beach.  Air and sand scrape your muscles, ribs, heart.  The smell of salt as ocean waves lap against you.  You tremble.  The aching reminds you that you're breathing.

It's a feeling you can never forget, and will always cherish.

Diagnosis

As you crack like an egg in front of them, they seize your body, prying the pieces apart with long silver tools.

Like surgeons they tease apart every fiber, every sliver of fat, every thread of your nerves.  They see your raw, bleeding body, naked in the light.  The air shocks your senses, and you lay gasping as they work.

O O

All of the hairline cracks veining your china body.  Hissing as sand trickled through, sprinkling a trail behind you.  All of the hairline cracks, forming a code.  A code everyone could read.

Surrounded by eyes darting between you and the trail of sand.  Back and forth, holes that gaped as their fibers contracted.

All of the hairline cracks finally connected across your face.  Shards crashing, sand sparkling under the fluorescent light.  Everyone heard, eyes darting, everyone saw.  Surrounded by eyes, surrounded by light.