Nothing Doing Niksen

My body was never a target—
No one watched it like a hawk—no one
Wanted to possess it so badly

They overlooked the person in it
Who was and wasn’t, really, quite it—
And yet someone was always cutting,

Helpfully, into it or leaping
Ahead of it to open a door,
Often as not too close to my face.

It wasn’t at all fashionable
To write about our bodies back then.
Others’ bodies were what you wrote on.

For your self, you expressed your feelings.
Now, it’s bodies writing on bodies,
Reimagining and reclaiming

Bodies, mostly their own or like theirs,
Everywhere. I consider this corpse,
Still breathing, still painful, still broken

And valiantly incompletely healed.
Location, location, location.
I don’t want nothing to do with it,

I can’t not be in it and be it,
But I do want to do nothing much
Past sit with it while the days go by,

And write about the world that’s not it,
The sun on blank walls, the blank moon hours.
Forgive me if I don’t write on it.