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
