Poem: Song

Song

Words nestle into the cadence of the heart,
the body's metronome. Time and sustenance marked
in this alien landscape, its orbiting moons gathering light
in handfuls and dispersing it on the body,
a body alien, framed in blue, rubbed deep brown
awaiting the brave and foreign to part its skin.

The heart knows, accelerando!
the anesthetized body's tongue. Even in this state
the heart has reasons that reason knows not.
Even in this state, the body sings.
We are interpreters of language.
Anesthesia is, willingly,
a fascination with the surrender of the body,
muting before interrogation, a reversal
of things natural, a conscientious poisoning.

The more we inhale those fumes,
the more we realize it is as much a snare
for the recipient as the giver, that as we
tame more and more of the wild,
we become more ambitious
in some quest to cure human ailment.
Where is that border? Where is that limit
beyond which the body no longer sings
but cries out, beyond which we, with all
our draughts and devices and guilement
cannot rescue the body from
the enchanted sleep we devise
and the sleep it craves?