ON THE NATURE OF FLESH (AND THE FLESH OF NATURE) is a youthful mix of extended metaphor, low humour, rambles about nature, society, capitalism, queer politics and anything else that the poet feels at least mildly strong about.
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My leg has a caged bird inside it. It twitches, flutters, When I'm nervous I can feel it scratching sometimes On the inside of my skin. Sometimes, when it's feeling Particularly malicious at its captor It'll spear a muscle or organ straight through. Though for all the pain it might cause me I can't help feel pity for the thing.
Even a shrike needs to feel the air under its wings.
If I could, if I was brave enough, I would cut it out. Exorcise it bloody and painful and twitching and free In all its glorious gruesome rebirth. No longer under its moral obligation, my debt repaid, The two of us, finally, set free from one another.
But think I might these things, between the pain, The painful ache this bird gives me I can't imagine how much the creature longs for the free expanse of air that waits beyond my skin Still I keep it.
Safe in a cage of my bones I keep it, Warm and dark and loved, And it, in turn, becomes as much a part of me as I am.
Perhaps the time is yet to come for me to speak his caw through our shared lips. As flesh becomes flesh and bones become bone,
So long as debts remain unpaid, the shrike and the human are one.
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