Serieusement. How would you define your existence? What is your relationship with and perception of your physical body?
Which of these two assertions do you agree with more:
A. I have a body.
B. I am a body.
Or as one redditor pondered, are you inside your body?
I prefer to think that I have a body. I also like these comments:
~ you’re a brain piloting a bone mech wearing meat armour
~ I think my body is a microcosm of something greater. My identity begins and ends with my body, but my existence and qualia of my existence doesnt.
~ Neither. My body is an inconvenient afterthought needlessly anchoring my consciousness. I remember this every time I stub a toe.
~!~
Do you ever find yourself stuck between two mindsets? Or in the viscous hairs of patterns whereupon you get a kick in life-momentum, you’re convinced something substantial is about to happen, and then it doesn’t; so then you fall into doldrums of waiting … just like Sisyphus. Instead of pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch the rock roll down again, though, you’re chasing someone else who is draggin a boulder up a hill, and when you get to the top the person is gone? You decide to stay where you are on that outcropping and just when you sit down because you’ve decided to watch paint dry or a carrion bird have a snack, you see that person on the bottom of the hill pulling that shiny boulder again. So, you stand up, run, tumble, or plunge downward because you think you can catch them. And it keeps repeating….you can never reach the person who is pulling you along.
Yeah, that’s where I am.
~!~
Nice Things
You had a bad case
of a six-pack,
the cans were encircled
too tightly
and you couldn’t loosen
the blue brew
from the red.
I had a sad face
from a clown’s last act
my skin suffocating with white resin
and an exaggerated mouth
piercing in red lipstick.
Sharpened incisors beat the canines
to the forefront of appetites
gleaming in sweat and ice
I clamped down on your wrist
like insatiable Claudia.
You didn’t scream
you didn’t beg me to stop
you just tried to choke me out
at the cliff’s edge
where an explosion of
tendons and seeds
waits for celestial heights
into free-falling.
– yiqi 25 April 2022 5:34 pm
This poem was inspired by a text conversation, Taylor Swift’s Reputation album, and Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994).
Originally posted on my tumblr.