Dear Body, Beloved and Disobedient

Do you know what it's like to be trapped? 

A genie in a bottle that is dirt-encrusted and chipped, 

The bottle washed ashore,unsympathetic waves at its foot lapped;

 How must it be to have your breath smothered, your spirit in the bud nipped?

 Only this particular genie awaits no Alladin, For liberation isn't a privilege it is destined for,

 The shrapnel inside the bottle is familiar, the pain is excruciating, 

Yet our genie dare not venture out too far.

And that's how I feel at times, 

In this body that cocoons me, an ever deteriorating meat puppet, 

It makes me yell, it makes me wince, it makes my mind reel.

 There are days I could swear on every deity in every pantheon

 That there's an infernally hot river of molten Stygian iron

 Flowing through my innards, fashioning stalagmites 

Out of the crevices in me, so pristine, so dazzlingly white.

 But my heart rejects such fanciful conjectures with a firm 'lub' and 'dub', 

Its merry circadian rhythm keeping my body warm, 

Even as my soul asphyxiates somewhere within, such has always been the cruel norm.

 It's because of such incorrigible disobedience, that I punish my body all the time, 

For it does not suffer, it does not grieve when I do, 

For how else do I browbeat it into following the same rhyme?

For vengeance I must wreak,

Maybe by watching pink lines turn vermillion and then scarlet on my wrist,

 Where else might I find the salvation I seek, 

Maybe by fantasizing about the font they should write my epitaph in, maybe about who'll eulogize me,

It's such an exhaustingly long list. 

Or maybe, I could just bandage my arm, 

And tell the next person who'll bother to ask,

 "Oh, that's just an injury with a compass," 

Hoping they won't see right through my carefully crafted mask.