I’ve begun to see the dust on the floor –

in braids, roping underneath the bed and nightstand,

rooting in my wooden planks. Begun to see

 

this head of hair, graying and matted,

my living littering the country

like a slow sloughing, a peeling death –

 

me, emptying my urn on concrete

and waiting rooms,

outstripping my best.

 

It’s a one-woman show –

the way I unzip

and crawl out of myself anew.

 

This is progress, our need to outgrow ourselves,

day by day, the fresh skin, 

metallic, the hard drive, warm as a heart. 

 

Meanwhile: our wire carotid arteries

shipwreck on the coast of my birth, and

the children I could have been

 

pick at the deep back of a TV

for gold, circuit boards, the waters burning

with mercury and plastic smoke, the cancer

 

I should have had

breaking another family brittle.

I am not there, but here with the corpse I’ve shed:

 

a map with no X, a trail charting the restless felon.

The old self, disowned,

is waste. Should I burn? – Or perhaps,

 

show me to decompose.

Teach me to live

without wreckage.