Internal Organs

The brain launches grenades 

into the crowded room of my body

where they explode their chaos

of shrapnel demands, but then quietens

at least in sleep, where it creates all beginnings

and all endings and untethers its dreams

until my mind is made up of Trojan horses.

Other organs are oppressed by it:

my liver thinks it's an ancient protagonist

that has been relegated to a few mumbling lines

in an underrated Greek play; its tragedy 

of unthanked labour and unflinching heroism,

though my kidneys, twins, silent missionaries

of piss, gentle pacifists of nested dormice,

don't ask for the same attention.  

It's the heart that strides in leg-kicks

of unmet needs and desires,

but dressed up in pressed uniform

as a soldier who marches to a clock

nonetheless, in tick and tock, tick and tock

despite the ever more brittle breaks 

and mends and how it turns upon a pin

of pain because it lets anyone in

with its wants and wants, it moons

and tongues its hazy brightness,

wrestling any opposition.

All wring the stomach, these days 

a rumbling fascist, and turn the guts

of internal organs held in bodily suspension,

I am water who washes away

with layers of atoms and molecules

that swim in this universe of flesh. 
 

Image from pixabay.