LITERATURE

By Thomas Heath

SINGULAR

You don't own yourself, 

you are yourself. 

You don't own the flesh and the bones, 

you are the chemicals and the nerve, 

you unnerve yourself because you live 

and breathe hard, soft, and then hard

as the tails of your nerves burst. 

You live as you are and so 

you're more than a washed car or real estate, 

you express over your lips symbolically 

and covertly, passing soul through you 

as the world pours into your experience 

and you re-use ghosts to keep up 

and above the water. 

Singularly, you stand between tide and gravity, 

with the sun in your eyes, 

atomic and energised, feeling motorised, 

with the sweat 

that slips down to meet

and greet your stomach, navel and 

you definitely don't own that

but it is most definitely yours. 

You don't own yourself, and neither do

neither does the monsoon

when it crashed on your head with a wind

blessed by frost. You don't own 

these things but you experience them, 

so too do you suffer skin and muscle, 

but in experience comes becoming, 

and so you, my darling, become them, 

you have been becoming you ever since

you first kicked chubby, infant legs out into 

unknown space beyond, 

translating yourself into the distant earth. 

Translate yourself to understand joy, to experience 

understanding and translate the pain 

that makes you speak and exhale, 

experience and become it to 

grasp it and hold it in warm light, 

birthing new experience, new self. 

You live, you don't own. 

You die, you don't own. 

You are matter, 

and you matter to me.

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