I'm not sick. (a poem)

It's just planetary fluency.

The Earth Body, by Mx. PunkRogers

The body politic is growing pale
and I wake up with head aching
and stomach unsettled
and feet hurting for ground

i've got Gaza in my gut
immigrant detention in my shoulders
capitalism gnawing at the soft meat of my adrenals
I feel anti-Blackness pressing heavy in my neck—
a violent Indigenous unmaking
in my sacrum’s disjointed bones,
muscles aching from being cinched
by the hard wires of trans erasure

I was told this body is mine
but whose sobs are these
lodged in my diaphragm?
whose tears pool
behind my eyes?
and whose screams can I feel
clawing at my throat?

I press my hand to my chest.
I feel them all—
especially the mothers, the femmes,
the disappeared, the violated,
the starved, the sniped,
mother ocean boiling quietly.

they say it's personal
I say it's planetary
I’m not sick.
My body is just fluent
in the language of my surroundings.

My thyroid
is the burial ground
for casualities
of the patriarchy

My esophagus
the front lines of refusal
to swallow the poison

of compliance
of assimilation

to whiteness,
to nationalism,
to heteronormativity.

I’ve been too flexible,
a contortionist—
twisting into shapes
not meant for me

and holding still when I’m shaking

and the fatigue
that came from
believing the lie that
rest was lazy
and lazy
was unloved.

This dis-ease , this pain, not just mine
but yours, and yours, and yours.
I did not do this to myself.
My body is not just attacking me.
It is doing unto me what was done unto it.

When voices are met with silence and betrayal
over and over and over
they turn inward
and on themselves.

Becuase there was no where else to go.

Emotion must find outlet and form
It’s very nature is movement
it craves visibility
it craves recognition.
My symtoms, its mirror.

I am not a victim.
I am a casualty.
I am collateral damage
for a war machine that is anti-love.

and I am love.

there is no such thing as
an isolated illness,
bad genes,
or an unhealthy lifestyle.

There are coping mechanisms
There are adaptations
There are evolutions
There are switches flipped
because of too much darkness.

I am not malfunctioning.
I am a sensory organ
of a planet in distress.

I am that planet, and
I am the fire of stars and our sun—
a tree in a forest connecting earth and sky—
the deep pulse of oceans—
the wild chaos of shifting winds.
I am you.

I am all these things, and more.