travels

A Poem by SkinlessFrank

he unloaded

in the toilet

the membranes and blood

and a brown, milky fluid

which his doctor called

liquefied pork

later on

(once the children were asleep)

there was more

neck cheese

and some sort

of jelly-like mass

Sweet Jesus, he said

a body

can travel this Earth

the accumulations

will accumulate

the toenails will yellow and crack

and that’s what

we call a life

© 2023 SkinlessFrank

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Reviews

Eilis

Aging along with my kids has been a more awkward experience than I had the imagination to anticipate. When they were babies I didn’t imagine my own timeline. Theirs was the dominant one. But when they hit the teen years and I began to feel very keenly the differences between us—the ways their paths diverted and my mind and body started showing the age, the splitting of the timelines was obvious.

Your poem made me think of this. When we are in the middle of things there’s this sort of suspension of awareness almost. Life is happening but the living of it creates a dynamic that sort of defies some kinds of registering. I don’t know. Maybe this is just me. I feel I’ve lost years.

The juxtaposition between the expulsion of what’s been taken in and the building blocks of accumulation—and how that wears on us—creates this interesting dynamic in my head. Like we’re bouncing around in time. With others but also alone. And what happens is rarely clear until some after time.