No matter how much I rest this flesh
It awakens nervous.
Heart thumping wildly in the canister of warm bed
I gaze through eyeballs dimmed by the crust of residual dreams,
across expansive sheets, fighting off unconscious tempos as
the primitive squirrel box explodes in miniature high pitch wails
igniting the chattering chorus of shattering
amphibious teeth to the full quire of gravity.
Bothered by instinctual aches 
I distill my adrenaline stench into the widow haze
and begin a terrified schmoozing with my prayer book.
Some type of light has been left for me
in the recessive motifs of bare gray Autumn tones.

Who needs headphones when you can nod 
to your own internally spoken melodies,
a Torah of the body with break beats,
pauses which open deep chasms of thin winter light.
Once the gelatinous veneer of happiness congeals into a salty drop,
shoved into the corner of eye with all the other sentimental refuse,
then you see:

The stomach sits tight like a flower bud! Playing old cellular recordings
of majestically pained sound, historically accurate explosions
of 60 years
200 years
I can carry 2000 years around with me in my blue jeans pocket!
wherever I go, that’s my own hand, 
I mean, anxiously balling into a half fist.
No, they can’t break me, they can’t
break me down, into self-hating syllables
that roll silly, goofy, doofy
kicked around, whining, rolled over on their bellies
in the dirty wet ground:

Mutter broken chants by the CD player, then
carry 3000 years like gym clothes in a messenger bag,
dragging around this forever internally skinny shaking Jew
and mumble panicked reminders, “You have a body, you have
a naturally organic occurring weapon, hands and feet, and teeth....."
Most especially a body for rocking.
Yes, I can rock 5,000 years in the syntax of mind,
Special synaptic stones
to provide the proper leverage
to bow, swing, and moan.

To lift up these hills which mutilate
my face like swollen lumps
this plastic surgery of exile
contorting my cheekbones with the bloating, bulging
of a victim’s cry, you see this hunchback
is but a table which got stuck under my shirt while
I was trying to hide under its scared surfaces
But the rage can not be hidden, the face
the chest, the arms, ankles cannot help
but display beauty once muscles are
drawn and squeezed, like a horse
preparing for gallop.  Like a horse running,
I am so sitting so still, I cannot help
but explode with royal laughter.

Adam Shechter is the editor of the on-line poetry journal,The Blue Jew Yorker. He can be reached at thebluejewyorker@gmail.com.