Create a skin for me A man lies in a cot, a wooden coffin, facing the sheet of ceiling which separates him from the night. His face floats up towards him in the dark mirror like the face of the dead man in the mud whose eyes looked like the seeds of blackened flowers in the ground. He does not know why he is here, in this narrative, waiting for a God to displace him somewhere else. Lungs, trachea, alveoli spread out like a map of rivers, estuaries and ponds in the landscape of this chest. His veins were tributaries, emptying into the wells of his eyes. Pulsating weakly, reminding him of the inevitability of existence. There is a light near him outside which hovers in mid-flight; exposing trees, bricks, stone. He is another of their world, of darkness and limpets pushing into bone. His sentences lack words which require others to fill - those who were not birthed into grass, stars and sea. Words like teeth which gradually fall out in time, leaving gaps in the mouth of years which stumbles clumsily on its gummy sentences. 'Create a skin for me,' his eyes say, 'where youth can look back on age.' When bathing, one's skin is washed off and slides, silent, from one's body. It is translated into words, sounds, images. The curvature of a spine against a neck. The hollow of a cheek. The broken seashells of one's fingernails. Water moulds into body when one bathes, replacing the painting of skin which one day would hold fire, the next breathe air. All that is left is earth from which to build another skin from. ~ Inspired by Michael Ondaatje's 'The English Patient' #I'mback