The creature runs through the Arctic ice, pursued by Dr Frankenstein

By | 1 May 2019

What have these blunt fingers touched
what made this heart beat faster

in the flesh chest that grew it?
Before they became mine: became

the motley coat that is me?
Did this palm stroke softer flesh

in reciprocal love? My hands,
(if mine they be through mere possession)

may turn black from the kiss of frost.
Even these broad splayed toes

propelling me through snow.
My flesh spreads away from itself,

as if it too finds the latticework
of my woven skin disgusting.

He chases me now, a blind dog
chained to me by loathing.

Yet he sewed these fingers
with his own. These toes he assayed

as a surveyor uses an alidade
to map continents, or mere streets.

He loved the precious detail,
retracts himself from the whole,

and would smear me on the ice.
Me, the only one ever born

without a mother, made
by pure scientific fumbling.

And so we run. Always north.
This sharpened North

tears my skin with teeth
always all its own. My own teeth

tasted flesh I never saw;
this tongue may speak languages

that even he can’t speak.
I am the king of second-hand

The prince of second-feet.

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