Kate Camp

There is no easy way

This is the way you will travel through the world
On feet, on arrangements of bones and body parts.
There will be the feeling in your teeth
When you bend a book and its pages squeak
And the feeling when you are exposed to tortures in movie plots.
You will occupy, in equal amounts, your clothes
And the space around your clothes.
You will be standing on top of your shoes.
You will be walking inside the lining of your coat
And your fingers will poke through the frayed pocket lining.
Around the islands of your back teeth, rich with metals,
Will be the liquids that you drink, disappearing down your throat.
Deep inside your body there will be disasters. Only small ones.
And to some extent there will be air and world inside you,
An egg of it inside your mouth, and a clam of it.
When you lie in the dark you will be nothing but a clock
Spending your limited supply of minutes on minutes.
You will always be inside things, be they rooms, buildings,
or atmospheres, because there is no outside.
And I will tell you something, you will have animals inside you.
Two dark, dark bears, sleeping in a reek of their own urine.
Swans caught with their wings open like fountains.
And there will be racoons, black eyes full of night time.
They feed on rubbish when they can’t find a home in the woods.

___________
More :
Hinemoana Baker | David Beach | Hera Lindsay Bird | Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle | Rachel Bush | Isobel Cairns | Craig Cliff | Natasha Dennerstein | Lynley Edmeades | Micah Timona Ferris | Rob Hack | Bernadette Hall | Helen Heath | Greg Kan | Brent Kininmont | Aleksandra Lane | Frankie McMillan | Hannah Newport-Watson | Rachel O'Neill | Briony Pentecost | Elizabeth Russell | Kerrin P. Sharpe | Maggie Sturgess | Tim Upperton | Louise Wallace | Ashleigh Young