i am scabs. light-thin leathered. neonate or half-flayed. and i am creeping up their nape, braille on silken canvas. i tuck myselves under coffin nails. and then i am the sun like a nairobi fly, burning spine and skin. i am scabs, i return, i creep into secrets, i form in patterns. i am patterns into crewel-work.

and now you see one of me in the worsted.

and now i wonder who. oumarr? or oga with fireflies in xyr hair, outbirth of passion, unborn? or passion himself, the barren boy beneath a haiku? sappho with freeform locs, painting wings onto a dryad? or the body inside itself, strait-jacketed

on clay earth or the concrete driveway?

i am both horns of the moon, growing into you … so by new light of yourself, you see the body. you know i am the classroom window above it. you know i am the child at the window, four-storeys high, repenting the body’s shadow. i am the shadow unstitched from its body. the shadow turned crow, prime minister in midair. i am taking off from the body and the clay earth or the concrete. then like a mango leaf, i am beneath the god-cat’s paw. trembling. and by now, you know. i am the god-cat

and finally i have seized myself.

i am an artist, i say to the crow. please understand, i say when i claw its feathers off. feathers to fur, fur to feathers, you and i, we, me, feathers to earth. i must tell stories. because i am one. one or a legion of stories, as are all of us, one and legion.

plumage on clay, black on red like a grecian vase painting.

i am exekias, i form feathery figures in the soil. the crow is bald;

the first story, complete.

now, the year is 1983 and i am your figure on the far-right, curved and daring, a bard and her lyre. the bard is the muse; she supplicates simply to the white-armed truth. i am the indigo girl she sings of in her poem. langue de la petite mort; fucked up and philtred soul; i am her first love. her tree spirit, my heart on a bough, grape-green and wounded. the poem grows and i am in her arms, her heart beating into my backbone.

she is kissing my neck. my moans are caesurae.

we are reading fiction to the sea.

it is her idea that the tides too might be flattened by these worlds. and it is mine that the oceans have known better universes. we read till the bard sobs mid-song; truth is a false god; the stanza, dream-dust. i am the body, caged by the window, always frowning down. and i am scabs. today, i age, form in full, fall away.

and it is the beginning.