New poem: Tissue Sample

poetry/t/tissue.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+Tissue Sample
+2022-05-19
+
+***
+
+How do I come to terms
+with the fact that I will die?
+How do I look my mother in the eyes
+and say, "You won't have me
+for that much more time?"
+
+I look in your eyes,
+and I see a flame
+that burns so bright,
+that signals something
+arriving
+just over the horizon.
+
+I expected to be dying by now,
+strength fleeing from my limbs,
+lungs crushed by anxiety
+like the world itself was closing in.
+I got all my homework done early
+in February
+even though graduation was three
+months away, not knowing
+what state I would be in,
+six months from onset
+being the low end.
+But except for the sores that pulse
+in movement's fury and sleeptime's lull,
+I'm just as healthy as ever.
+
+I'm searching my body for every possible sign
+that the end is coming, that looms my demise.
+And I am in pain, I will admit,
+but not nearly enough to classify myself as sick.
+I'm in a science classroom, with scalpel prodding myself.
+Clean up the experiment, jar me up, return me to the shelf
+in tanager's formaldehyde, amber sleep, sanctioned suicide.
+You haven't really died until you've returned to the earth,
+I think, given back the dust in your bones
+to this planet that insists it be your home.
+You haven't really disappeared
+until your body has dispersed so much
+that nobody can point at the ground and say,
+"The person I love now rests here."
+
+This vessel, I hope, will not be preserved
+in a morgue, under a man's care, final horror.
+My body was never ever really mine
+in this life.
+Mother still sometimes cries
+that I'm not a doll anymore,
+won't wear dresses anymore.
+Will she keep me around when my body moves nevermore,
+preserved, plasticized,
+mannequin most lifelike?
+Deny me Velouria's embrace one last time?
+
+***
+
+CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander