City Bones

You manticore!
You freak beast!
Made of panic
made of dreams
and pictures from
a magazine.

Mantis limbs
move too quick
taking seeds
to snake mouth
snake jaw
dislocates
muscles swim
over bone
wolf teeth
crunch birdseeds
twig fingers
stuff them in
they stuff them in!

And stray dog
starving eyes
are everywhere
on everything
they only see
…freak!

The underground train approaches the underground station and as is its underground wont it begins to brake — gradually at first, but then with mounting urgency, as though the driver had overestimated the distance to the platform. The deceleration unbalances many of those passengers — among whom may be numbered our underfed protagonist — who have risen to their feet in anticipation of this most central of interchanges. As the commotion of jostled shoulders and grabbed bars spreads among them, a few people experience an odd and fleeting sense of inversion. It is as though they have momentarily ceased to be individuals whose presence and behavior combines to form a crowd, and become instead the avatars of a crowd that has chosen to express itself through certain individuals.

Fat lips
looks up
from her magazine
sees skull hips
through tight jeans
shoulderblades
like scalpel blades
thinks fuck you
skull cunt
skull womb
fuck your bones
your empty bones.

Fat fingers
flip pages
slick as lies
slick as sheets
wet with semen.

All she wants
is soft eject
soft release
from all this feeling
from never feeling
she's enough
never fleeing
from she's too much.

She sees
big big shades
on a hollow face!
Big big shades
on a hollow face!

With the carriage disgorged of the greater part of its occupants, and the doors snapped shut with their usual mandibular vehemence, the train pulls away from the platform and begins to accelerate into a tunnel. When our corpulent antagonist next glances up from her magazine she is greeted not by the funhouse mirror of her insecurities made emaciated flesh, but simply by her reflection. Or rather, her reflections: two copies of her endomorphic form — almost, but not quite, on top of each other — hover in the dirty darkness of the opposite window. As she gazes at this double act of demotivation — striated by the striplights in the tunnel wall — a paradoxical relief courses through her. That's me, her nervous system seems to sing, that fat face in the mirror is me, me, me.

Stone skin
steel hair
pipe guts
wire nerves
the city breathes
the city bleeds
the city screams
city dreams!

Stairs move
your bone feet
your claws grip
the handrail
heads turn
squirm away
they squirm away!

Can't you see
what they see?
Can't you feel
city fear
in your veins
city bones
through your skin
city death
of everything
of everything.