The same old refrain and I’m tired of hearing it,
tired of repeating it, discussing it, hugging it tight,
loving it to let it go, dealing with inner demons,
blaming the media.
It’s the flesh.
It’s always the flesh.
Moods come and go and some days I can leave the house.
Past traumas come to visit and overstay their welcome.
All of it fluxing
except for the flesh.
There’s too much of it.
There’s always too much and I’m so tired of these thoughts.
Is it too much to ask to be allowed to simply live in my body,
not hate it even as I stand naked in front of the mirror
saying “I love you” because if you say it often enough,
you’ll believe it.
Or so they say.
I’m still waiting for the love
and the flesh is piling on.
Uneasiness is growing for all that I try to be easy,
say it doesn’t matter,
say that it’s fine.
I’m more than just my body.
I’m a deep pit full of terror
that is threatening to explode because of the word that keeps
ping-pong-balling around my brain pain
which is, of course, “fat” and the word is
unswayed by logic because the flesh is there,
soft and loose with ripples that shift with movement.
I try and blame myself for being lazy not fat
because sedentary has been my lifestyle of late
but logic is powerless in the face of flesh.

{What do you know, some random and poorly edited poetry. It’s been a while; poetry doesn’t visit much anymore. I read somewhere that the gift of poetry is like the gift of mathematics; you do your best work before thirty. At any rate, it doesn’t come often but it did today, likely because I feel uncomfortable in my body. In the early days of my eating disorder I wrote a lot of bad poetry. It’s probably some kind of memory pathway. I decided to use the cool brackets that probably have a very specific purpose because they make me smile. They look like special occasion brackets. I also decided that I need a much wider bracket selection.}

(I’ve used, if not this image, then a shockingly similar ones. It’s tragic that so many like this are so readily available. Normal brackets this time.)