There is a furnace nailed beneath my tongue.
Not a soul, not a dream, not a sickness
a furnace that eats the names of things before they can become obedient.
The walls insist they are walls.
I have watched them molt.
The floor crawls upward to interrogate my feet.
Every object has teeth hidden beneath its usefulness.
Do not tell me the world is intact.
I have heard it splinter behind its own face.
You arrive carrying clocks, papers, gentle voices sharpened into instruments.
You ask me to return.
Return where?
To the kingdom where every mouth agrees to call the knife a spoon?
No.
The body knows a geography the maps assassinated.
My ribs contain birds that were never granted feathers.
My blood writes alphabets that your dictionaries burn before dawn.
There are voices.
Do not mistake them for visitors.
They are the bones of language gnawing through the skull, trying to remember the first cry that existed before grammar murdered thunder.
You call this disorder.
I call it the price demanded by a universe too immense to pass through a single throat.
Strike me with your certainties.
Bind me inside immaculate rooms.
Count my pulse.
Measure my sleep.
Number the fractures of my invisible anatomy.
You will still fail to imprison the animal that has no organs, the fire that devours even its own ashes, the scream that tears open the mouth of God only to discover
another mouth
still screaming.
