I Am Matter, Nothing More
Old Skin
Skin. It's the cloak that binds you; blinds you from the world. It's the spider web that warns the fly to rethink his route. It's the costume that ignores the tact of full disclosure and implores lengthy brooding analyses to the prize within the guise. It's your private canvas for you to paint and poke and cut and mold and stitch and ink and tan and pinch and bathe and kick and spit upon, and it's your blank page to write the wraths and remedies of your world. It's the front you plague upon the Earth. It's a business-plan synopsis - full of engaging anecdotes and bristling wit, only to bow under the burden of what's really underneath it all... You.
Ah! That's what we forget! It's you, and your hang-ups, your dreading, your bleeding heart, your fickleness, your quivering palm, your wavering sweaty soul, your crooked intent, your bellowing lovesick tummy in the humdrum sun-bloom afternoon, your elated tongue-dart psychoses, your plaintive floor-tom heart, your pulse-pump thump neuroses and your malevolent pig-fucker charity siren song that lurk beneath that old skin bag serenade. You've got a lot to hide. You've got the weight of the world beneath the skin on your shoulders alone; imagine what lies beneath the rolls of your brow! Second guess the synapse-strum of what you bury below your cell-speckled molecule hide, and when your house of cards slowly crumbles to piles of waxed-paper Arabic numeral nightmare, with Anglo-Saxon monarchy symbolists pointing and prodding your mirage, you're doomed to a stint in the pit. Everyone loves an ace in the hole, but nobody unearths a diamond in the rough without using a club. Check your vitals; it's the truth.
The Shedding
Slither out, frail pupas hominid; embrace the wind and heat and rain to your stark-pink sheen veneer. You'll always need to shed your skin, no matter what. No matter the social armor, no matter the costume, no matter your education or lack thereof. You grow and you wrinkle; you spread and you flake; you burn and you shiver. That's the way of it. Of all the ways to nullify the importance of your life, clutching that which is not you anymore is the most depressing. Ignoring the ripples in your mind, negating the chill at the back of your neck to morph and to mince words with yourself is to deny the essence of the journey. I've shed my skin too many times. Not to forget, or for regret, or for insistence on a me I'd like to be, but to evolve in the most natural ways to what is comfortable. Your skin is magnetic - attracting the positive, repelling the negative, in every way. Jobs, friends, love, bugs, harboring ultraviolets, shooshing the whispers of the damned. And there's no way around that. You are a billboard, painted with the missives of your world. And people are noticing, all the time.
New Skin
Embrace the changes. Get lost. Find things that nobody cares about but you. Tar and feather yourself if the mood strikes. Bleach and etch and cut and bruise. Everyone loves a clown. My skin has been stretched and shrunken, fattened, thinned, besmirched with plaintive worry lines, tagged by errant numbness in the legs. I walk around in this cellophane wrap, coolly calculating the streets with my tired muscle-lunge. This skin bag disguises phantom bone chill, broken heart, flat-panel rib displacement, pensive guts, weighty apathy and more confusion than the wayward moth in firelight. I will treat the outside as I treat the inside: I will degrade and deconstruct this flesh to mirror its infinite beyond. I will flake and burn and cut into it when I feel it is necessary to focus on pain and discipline instead of poverty, hunger and ignorance. It is mine. I am matter, nothing more.
