There’s something undereath me
Scratching at the walls,
Something wearing my hands
like they belong to someone else.
My fingers start confessing
in a language I never learned.
My tongue turns traitor,
trying to escape through my teeth.
And I shake.
Not because I’m cold–
there’s no cold here.
Just this terrible electricity
with nowhere left to go.
I want to crawl
out of my own skin,
leave this body
standing empty in the room.
Every nerve screaming
MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!
But where do you go
when the prison is everywhere you are?
The clock crawls toward seven.
The walls get closer.
My heartbeat becomes a siren
nobody else can hear.
I shake until
I almost disappear.
Then, for a little while,
the storm loosens its grip.
The body becomes quiet.
The tongue comes home.
The hands stop trembling.
And I am left wondering
which part of me
was trying to escape–
The mind…
The body…
Or me.
