My Whole Body

My whole body becomes chest and throat; October raises me, like a forest sliced and glued and soundboarded, to his neck. He will bring the wind, the last heat, and the sudden fall of night. Until this concert, I had always imagined my ghosts drifting in robes. I am varnished with a formula only necromancers and beetles know. Everyone says the instruments are electric now; we are cyborgs so that you won’t fear when the night breaks into inhuman traffic; we are all electric shifts, spots of shadow and cold. Or that is October. In his tuxedo and with those dark shoes polished so that I am looking at the limelight below...or a streetlight, beyond which the stars are blank and silent.

My whole body is chest and throat—you think he plays a special effect. A game of wires and electronics. A game of hunting for the soul in the buzz of a human house, humming to itself and letting its doors drift open. Like the game we play listening to the static of the stars, already turned between channels. Too much light pollution on the stage to see them in the midnight leather, they are only pieces of all of us, in the dust.

My whole body has become chest and throat and it is my voice that threads your nerves, plucks your stomach, and seems, almost, to form words in the goosebumps trailing beneath your formal attire. I sing in muscle. I linger in the drift of honey-crusted pine sap scraping across strings you’ll never quite see. I sing in the taste of the forest October remembers like an old score, long settled.

My whole body has become chest and throat. A song moans in the rafters.

Sharing today with The Sunday Muse and with Poets United, provided this passes their threshold for prose. :) I'm glad that October is here and I'm hoping that the rumors of a cool front next week will prove true.

-- Chrissa