You are not a mind, and you are not a body. Neither stardust nor dying meat.

You are an ecosystem.

You are flumes of blood embedded deep in your muscles, tough transparent strings of nerves branching from your spine, and the thin layers of tissue folding over each other like buds of furled petals. You are the humid caverns of your lungs, the rise and fall of flowing air.

The light shines through your eyelids like leaves of a rosy canopy, beads of sundew glistening on the flytraps beneath. Where fungus forms on the craggy undersides of fallen trees among ferns and thick vegetation, feeding on the decomposition of skeletal remains of prey.

You wish to be filled with the vivid colors of macaws and fan-winged moths, fluttering in the dark clearings and caverns of your flesh. But you cannot force the air under their vibrant wings to carry forth the rhythmic river surges of your drumbeat heart.

You are not made to be ethereal. You are substance and hunger, the dense undergrowth and the tigers slipping through narrow paths in the darkness-- their spines snaking and arching under sleek pelts, black slits in topaz eyes.

You are not meant to be a brutal divinity of droughts, suffocating them under your skin.

You are the scabby backs of armored gators in broad muddy rivers, overhung with tatters of moss. The ivory tusks, and rancid jaws, yellow claws and reptilian spines. The pythons coiled around thick branches, soft scales warmed by the dappled sun, the way their bodies pulse slowly forward in the wake of contracting muscle.

You are not a parasite of an astral realm, chained by the nature of your host.

You are the cycle of life and death.

You are an ecosystem.

© Alexandra Wollinka