Perch

It isn't long before I begin to realize how even from the beginning the eyes seek out distances, the weightlessness within the stride, the satellite built in memory that almost leaves me to part from these feet; when bones begin to splinter, click and creak inside of me from ankle to wrist-- hip sliding out of place-- like a tired pedestal, veins snapped from their straight posture, as the surge inside me slows. The ceremonies are always the heaviest, people gathered, hand-linked just long enough to know that cells have shut down, a liver drowns, and the heart is a temeramental organ; death becomes an affair of the flesh as I leave an oxidated streak in time, a frenetic unseen, pieces of me fallen to the ground-- hair, flesh, bone.