Collar III - Louise Giovanelli

Cover the clavicle with the collar, urgent, decisive, a signal of intent. Insufficient means of transformation aren't new. It's the operating room for the untrained, problem to solution with just a thin veil, a change of outward appearance. You're the fixer and the fixed. Blue veins are a trick of the light; blood is red and doesn't wash well. Purple is its inoffensive representative, damage: dressed up and covered over. If I can't talk sensibly about a collar, how can I explore what is beneath it? Scars and debris embedded, hidden, but for tricks of the light. There's a glint within every joy, rather than shrapnel lodged in flesh. It's more I'm lodged in life, a foreign body known about but accepted - not meant to be there, a blight a burden a regret. That no one wants to dig too deep to remove. I'm too near arteries, organs. Long ago, forgotten. Evidence of rendered hardship, but nevermind it. The weight of my soul doesn't tally. Preventing the crossing of borders. So I stay put, don't move on, avoid the discussion, carrying the fragments of harm. Is it safe to carry, an unknown risk of explosion - a risk of inflicting irremovable harm to anyone surrounding me? I'm part of it, it's part of me - the forevermore of long gone suffering. Emotional shrapnel. We were all once innocent bystanders - what are we now?