
Mending Movement
I want to take you apart.
Bit by bit, deconstructing with my mind.
Bones and skin and muscles
Take you down to your most basic components.
I want to see you stretch.
I want to coax your skin into
Letting me see. What it so often tries to hide.
A mighty shield of paper-thin cells against the outside world
But an insulator of internal pains. Pleas for help that
Can’t be answered by anyone but me.
Someone who can see.
Bones and skin and muscles
Pull and twist and roll,
I want to see you stretch
To take you as a whole.
I want to reconstruct a single fluid being
Want you to feel whole
Soul in a body which no longer restricts, freeing.
I want you to be lyrical
Each movement another line in your poetry
I want to remove the syllable and rhyme restrictions
Fill your pen with a rainbow of ink, fully and totally
I want to take you apart
And put you back together again
I want see you dissected on paper, names of bones and muscles and glands
Look at the layers and find where the bookworms
Have chewed away at attempted expression.
Restore fluidity and meaning to areas the world has damaged
And your body tries to hide away.
An addiction to beauty,
Disastrously obsessed with the miracle of movement.
Dreams from the ballet bar
Will one day manifest themselves as
The ability to detangle dances from twisted muscles and bruised bones.
I want to give back control over a complex network,
That the body will never reveal.
I want to soothe. I want to repair.
I want to heal.
I want to see them dance and feel and be free.
I want to live through their every twirl and stroll.
Pretend that each patient I can mend
Is me.