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How do I know I live?
The coffee besides my hand goes cold
before I can drink it.
But when the freight train passes,
the house and mug quiver like something
still reliving its roots.
Something we have in common.
This tooth argues constantly with my thoughts,
trying to prove there are always bigger pains.
A dangling cuticle tears the skin like a zipper
and refuses to close until the blood
has made its point.
That really makes me forget the toothache.
That’s how I know I live.
By eleven, the stomach starts its picket:
a rock band in the ears
shouting death, dread,
Vogon poetry, orbital decay.
If I dare eat cake after lunch,
my body weighs, bitchingly,
a lot more than before.
That’s how I know I live.
I thought life would be a pleasant valley
you walked through with a backpack and a map.
But they don’t give you maps.
It’s DIY instructions,
blind navigation without Google maps,
make your own adventure,
like IKEA, except it’s not furniture
but life and now you have to guess.
A lot.
Even grief is evidence:
a surviving anguish,
the cramping habit of reaching
for a hug, for someone’s hands
that are now only vague memory,
a phantom limb in human shape.
Life is the outlay no one tells you about:
blood on cracked lips,
sleep coming in episodes,
a sudden scary pause
while falling down the stairs,
then back to sleep,
lint I never invited
colonizing my belly button.
My liver works the night shift
and never clocks out,
cleaning whatever toxic mess
I leave for it, alcohol,
anxiety, my sick mind.
Cells haul their trash cans
in and out of the pain
while I stay busy
answering messages,
making lists,
escalating the next escalation.
I step into a room and forget why.
Come back with a bruise
I don’t remember getting.
It’s the fifth time today.
My body is a lousy journal.
It keeps every mishap
hoarded beneath the skin,
but I forget most of the scars
I carved there myself.
The mental ones, though, OH!
those I save and back up,
keep peeling the scabs from.
They give me something to feel.
A place where I am always bleeding
inside.
That’s how I know I live.
My lungs take winter personally,
half the year they cough their cold
complaint right into my mouth.
But my heart keeps marking [DONE]
on all the seconds
no one asked it to process.
I enjoy them, even when they hurt.
I save them onto memory:
more scabs to pick at,
more evidence,
more bleeding moments keeping
me from getting bored or boring.
Let them keep coming.
TYVM.
Cause that’s how I know I live.
Thank you for reading my work!
Hi, , I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!
I am a full time writer at the moment - I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and essays or dystopias when I’m really digging into possibilities.
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I think therefore you am.
Looks like you just described the lives of 8 billion people—plus those on your home planet.