Decomposing

Decomposing

The body is already in the process, not in death alone,
the living body is the body in the overthrown
equilibrium of construction and decay occurring
at the cellular level simultaneously, the blurring
of the line between the built and the unbuilt is not
a feature of the end but of the whole.

What we got is a body that is always building
and unbuilding itself,
the living and the dying on the same shelf.

I find it oddly comforting, the continuity of the process,
the fact that what I fear in the terminus
is already happening and I am already living it
and the living of it is not the ending of it.

The cells that are sloughing off the skin today
are replaced before the week is out.
The day of the dying of the cell
is also the day of the made.
The body is its own replacement and the trade.

Decomposing is not only what happens at the end.
Decomposing is the daily and the trend
of the living body processing itself and its resource.
Decomposing is the method and the course.

I am the sum of a billion daily decompositions,
the aggregate of the cellular transitions
that have been occurring since before I knew my own address,
the body managing its complicated mess
of construction and deconstruction simultaneously,
and the self that watches this is just the tumultuously
aware byproduct of all that biological work,
the consciousness that came along for the ride in the murk.