Resurrection

This is a declaration of my decision to speak

which is to say that I’ve decided to live

a life in which I honor the gift

given to me when I thought I was gone as a kid

hospital gown ghost trying to shapeshift

decrepped old bones back to Odysseus.

They said my fate was sealed in flesh with forty-nine stitches

and / so I write rhymes to redefine this myth

the / fates sealed my flesh with forty-nine stitches

that’s / why I write rhymes to redefine what myth is.

Whenever I feel trapped within the cage of illness

I take those 16 bars and rearrange the frame of my ribcage to build a stairway

between the mind and the heart

so neither will ever fade nor fall so far apart

that they can’t climb to find their way back to the start

when the soul and the body were one

before the scalpel begun

its careful quiet work of

removing the light from a son.

I still remember the darkness

of the bathroom stall where I hid.

Leaving the river, Narcissus would despair while gripping the toilet rim,

for surely he was not the thing staring back through the stains in the porcelain,

terrified for the first time he would try to hide his face

from the fact that he would always be sick,

and how do you reconcile with that as a kid.

I had no choice, I had to make sense out of language and spit,

and that was the gift given by the removal process.

I would spell spina bifida s. o. n. g. with the flick of a wrist.

I would shake the water and salt from the wings of Icarus

scratches in the wax, what was broken would be fixed

as my heart began to beat to beats by common

they said surgery but the only words I heard were

resurrection

re-resurrection

re-resurrection

re-resurrection.