Day 8 : Miss Me.

'I buy each breath I take.

I buy it with shed skin, footsteps,
the wheeze and gasp of my lungs
trying to barter with my heart,
prices high as a blood bank.

I buy them at night,
when I'm sleeping, and carry them
in paper bags like liquor.

I buy them and save them, when I can, and then hold my breath
like my lungs are leather pouches in raw
desert air, and I curl up the paper bags
hoping they don't escape. I engrave them
into rings, like wedding dates and names and
reasons to celebrate each year. Champagne.
They taste like that, alcoholic, bubbly, almost,
like smog when I spit them back out.

It's then that I wonder if my body is just a machine:
if all the veins and arteries that they tell me are red
are actually oiled and slick and chemicaled as a car--
if the smoke that they say is corroding the sky way up there
where we can't see, is just us exhaling,
exhaling,
drinking in the engravings that I scratched out with a fingernail
and I wonder if maybe if I could flip a switch to turn myself off for a while,
I would.

And I wonder if someone would flip it back.'


Quoted from http://www.teenagewriters.com/forum/showthread.php?p=456739#post456739