The right parts of the brain light up
for the wrong reasons. The fat
accumulates, the teeth stain,
but something has decided to remain.
Naked, it stands before you.
You hate it. With its winter clothes
they buttoned and zippered you up in your boyhood,
before you knew,
when you felt their tightness but scarcely understood.
The heavy coat, the cardigan and scarf
cannot come off, it says.
It says it has nothing to do with you.
It suffers no hope of removal,
though you dream of scissors cutting clean through the cloth,
the rasp of cold metal just grazing the skin
when your bedroom window shakes in its frame
and wakes you. In the darkness you sit up and scratch
and succeed, sometimes, in shutting out the voice,
so to mask the silence there is only the terrible wind
beating its terrible snow against the pane.
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