mammalian theater
by Nubia
Tonight we add grammar to our postures:
A comma-curved spine, exclamation splint anchored at the neck.
We do it for the politeness of being, I do it for the applause and the feeding.
All dressed up in clown, curl, unfurl, perform.
The mothers come from the pit of the earth, the infantile hide and cocoon,
the moon exhales a laborious musk, all did and undone in this theater
corrupts, adds calluses to soft meat, collapses the wealth of mediocrity.
We do it for the wisdom, I do it for the exhibition.
The fathers elongate to protect their sacs of incubating children.
Their small breaths slow and reverse for the comfort of throat.
We do it for the bodies, we do it for the swelling,
the lip folds, the mouth-hinge breaks, I do it to be appalling.
Tonight we are so intentional, tonight we are predatory and hostile.
The crowd waiting stale, circulating their drool out the side of the mouth,
licked up back inside by the tongue, in unison, poorly executed as they mock us.
We respond with our anatomy, we stretch the colon long, I burst the bladder.
We pull the vessels with precision, open from the front, bite down, swim in laudanum,
mute the cry, let it resonate as the sound of evolution, branch by branch expansion.
Do it for surgery, do it for knowledge, do it for diagrams and medicine.
We are indigestible, we are perverse while smiling.
We are the torment of homicide in vocal boxes full of lullabies.
Our museum, heavy in histories from bombs to botany, is printed onto folded paper.
We tell stories of hunger and abandonment, how we lifted from the circus
and settled again as vagrants.
Tonight we are so terrestrial, tonight we are land and limb, experimental.
Obscurity flows through us in the torso, at home at the navel, strings us unevenly.
Bent, bruised bodies, contorting for the hope of praise.
Begging for the monetary artifact, the malice cent of necessity.
We do it for the progression, I do it to indulge the compulsion.
The crowd, bored from the lungs up, rips from the soil armed with their own teeth.
Bite off an ear, sink into the fat, gnaw at the loose muscle.
They do it for war, they do it for the consumption.
Tonight we are so parted, tonight we are so pieced.
We come complete, come undone, we come egged, and sovereign,
in the weapon of the human temperament, on the primitive stage of the theater.
