A mushroom thrives in my backyard, fruiting twin bodies.

each, soap-soft in decomposing—

we sought newer ways to give name to the similarity in their rot.

here, I renounce despair

yet, cannot teach the stem of my body to bend towards light.

with each passing day, I strive to be everything but a gut-punch—

aimed at the jaw of teenagers wasting away on a plain field.

I kill the effort to hold my parents to a grudge.

no one born womb-tearing is innocent of this.

I wanted a life obscure as a poet,

till Pa took a dagger to my dream

& none of my soft vowels survived his blade.

I vowed to be something knife-carrying.

I think of a father first as a weapon—double-edged.

for years, I wake up to scrap metals puncturing me for details of my life's event.

cancerous, yet therapeutic in its hurting:

souvenir of my suffering that clings to my nightwear & wouldn't rid off.

it cost blood, this thing—to take shape in 

all the sharp objects that goes on to harm the world.

think of me in obeisance with rod: a walking murder case.

at Christmas eve, I defy cancer to see myself through a slaughterhouse;

fiddling over smoked meat, pierced clean by hot bayonet.

the price tag written in steel knows me by name.

how my gaze meet its stainless sight in fierce kinship.

isn't it nonferrous of me: to move through magnets & still not arrive bearing rust.

instead collect in size, like catchweed.

absconding the scene for the raw fear of blood;

I trip over a cyborg emptying its entrails in ion bowl.

our innards exchange cryptics.

if only to speak in metallic language.