I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out

This is my body; I have weather vanes
They're especially sensitive to dust storms and hurricanes
When I am nervous my teeth chatter like a wheel-barrel collecting rain
I am rusty when I talk
It's the storm in me
The doctor said someday I might not be able to walk.
It is in my blood like the Iron.
My mother is tough as nails.
She held herself together the day she could no longer carry my niece,
she said
'Our kneecaps our are prayer-beds, everyone can walk farther on their kneecaps than they can on their feet.'
This is my heartbeat.
Like yours, it is a hatchet, it can build a house or tear one down.
My mouth is a fire escape, the words don't coming out cannot care that they're naked. There is something burning in here.
When it burns, I hold my own shell to my ear. Listen for the parade.
When I was seven, the man who played the bagpipes wore a skirt.
He was from Scotland so I wanted to move there, wanted my spine to be the spine of an unpublished book.
My faith, the first and last page.
The day my ribcage became monkey-bars for a girl hanging on my every word.
They said, 'You are not allowed to love her.'
Tried to take me by the throat to teach me I was not a boy.
I had to un-learn their prison-speak, refuse to make wishes on the star on the sherif's chest.
I started wishing on the stars in the sky instead.
I said to the sun, tell me about the Big Bang.
The sun said, 'It hurts to become.'
I carry that hurt on the tip of my tongue, and whisper 'Bless your heart' every chance I get.
So my family tree can be sure I have not left
You do not have to leave to arrive, I am learning this slowly.
So sometimes, I look in the mirror and my eyes look like the holes in the shoes of the shoe-shine man.
Some days, my hands are busy on the wrong things.
Some days, I call my arms wings.
Well my head is in the clouds, it will take me a few more years to learn that flying is not pushing away the ground, but safety isn't always safe.
You can find one in every gun. I am aiming to do better.
This, is my body.
My exhaustion pipe will never pass inspection.
and still my lungs know how to breathe like a burning map every time I get lost behind the curtain of her hair.
Find me by the window, following my path to that trail of blood in the snow
The day I opened my veins the doctor who stitched me up asked me if I did it for attention.
For the record, if you have ever done anything for attention, this poem is attention, title it with your name.
It will scour the city bridge every time you stand staring at the river.
It never wants to find your body doing anything but loving what it loves.
Love what you love.
Say 'This is my body, it is no one's but mine.’
This is my nervous system, my wanting blood, my tongue, tied up like a ball of Christmas lights.
If you put a star on the top of my tree, make sure it's a star that fell. Make sure it hit bottom like a tambourine. Because all these words are stories to the staircase to the top of my lungs where I sing what hurts. And the echo comes back
'Bless your heart. bless your holy knee-caps.’
They are so smart.
You are so full of rain.
There is so much that is growing.
Hallelujah to your weather vanes.
Hallelujah to the ache, to the pull, to the fall, to the pain.
Hallelujah to the grace, and the body, and every cell of us all.