time to think about my face

thoughts on sneezing
Words that spatter the page
in a spiraling spread of wetness
and clinging mucus dotted with
the grime of a city barely known,
the sum of a day's experience
stuck and tangled in the body's
expulsion of matter,
yellows and greens and liquid
compelled outwards,
dots of dirt and smog,
caught trying to get in but
swayed by defences,
natural and unavoidable,
protecting delicate tissues with hair and mess,
an organ like no other,
unassuming in appearance,
and universal in function,
it is something little thought of
and integral to standard,
the net in which harms are caught,
but can't catch everything and

sometimes the mouth compensates
for what the nose cannot stop.



chewing
The whistle of a saw wakes me early as the sun shoots its way
through the gaps in the temple.
Feel the need to grind things between my teeth,
like nuts or seeds or rocks,
or to chew bones,
or the blade of that saw,
or bite on pens and plastic bottle caps.
Sometime just to hold something there,
marinating in saliva between tongue and jaw,
to hold something inside and know its textures,
reveling in the way it pushes
my tongue around itself.
I opened my mouth and let you in.
I tucked you in my cheek,
and like a drug or hydrating salts
you seeped into my blood.
It will be seven years before I am myself again.