Bodies Bodies Bodies

I do not know this body I am in. I do not know its boundaries. It escapes me, seeps out the edges and orifices when I try to put my hands around it. A dreadful metal claw gripping a slender middle. These bodies are so strong. They are so delicate.

We are here trying to justify this carnage, all the mess these colonising spirits made as they had their way. Molded us into their will. 

My body is not my own. It has never been mine. My sex, my blood, all my fleshiness, it belongs to another. I think, sometimes, it is a blessing to be a woman. At least none of this ever came as a surprise. I may wish for a thousand things, but my body will do it what it does. Eats, shits, sleeps. Smokes, sings, dreams.

My body will do what it does; I was sleeping with the spirits long before I knew there was something called not-me. 

Divinity in a pound of flesh. I love it when there isn’t enough. We were made for this. 

And maybe in a few hundred years, if everything wasn’t already broken, we could have chosen: tentacles or bear traps, where her arms should have been? Eyes that see through walls, or see through souls?

Multitudes team inside of me. I have never been less than a crowd. Never felt alone with my fingers. 

Fingers are the most beautiful appendage, aren’t they? Sliding over skin or plunging into fruit, moving swiftly over keys or under blankets. Sewing up. Undoing. 

Touch this filth; there is divinity in dirt. You have forgotten; fermentation is culture. Spit in my mouth and turn me into wine. Innoculate me, let your spores cover all my psychic skin until there is nothing left of me but substrate. Call this evolution. 

Come to me, with your colonising forces. Let your filth do battle with my filth. Noone else needs to know. Everybody will know. 

We could have been less than this, if we’d let them in. we could have been more than this, if it wasn’t for you. You were always screaming like your voice was an infection. You were always watching for it. That first crack, that light. Blink and you will miss it.

You will miss it. In your bubble, in your tower. You will miss the way the tardigrades sing. I'm not sure, but I think the microbes have their demons, too. I think the magical potentiality of matter goes all the way down. And we’re so scared of it. We want the human form to be the simplest possible form of personhood but I have known viruses with more personality than you. 

Make of it what you will. But I have found a special sort of beauty in the beautiful, a cultivation, a commitment. An enslavement no less profound than that of a man to his god. The tension breaks, but you must turn your head to see that it is all a matter of perspective.

Isn’t it funny, this thing that moves with us, or else rots around us, according to will. Isn’t it funny, this game these little gods play, like we are chess pieces or wind up-dolls, and godhood is everything that we call hormones.

I must say it more clearly, so you do not think amiss. Hormones are gods inside of us. Dance with all your gods.

Dance with the gods. This is what our bodies do. This is what, I think, we were made to do. To feel god in our physicality. To seduce our god with a certain movement of the hips, a certain posture. To feel him come upon us, and love us. To wake up aching, and filled with joy. 

The gods move with us. We try to stamp them out, as we have stamped out the bacteria and bugs that shaped us. But like the bacteria and bugs they crawl from out of the cracks, evolved into strange new states by all of our oppression. But inescapable, as they ever were. At the end of time there will be a council of tardigrades and cockroaches, and the final, lonely man will meet his gods. 

Our gods live in us, and die in us, too. Turn a microscope upon your face and find the corpse of god.