MY BODY, A CITY

My body, a city, my eyes, its cantonments. In them the eternal vigilance of watchful sentries. A railway station between my ears: there the unceasing tumult of crowds that wait for a mate or a prey and fall asleep, tired: folks who always miss their trains, orphaned thoughts gone astray, memories lost between the chiming of bells and the whistles of the wagons, fire-filled dreams that pant and wait for their green signals. My veins are rivers, noisy with anklets, my nerves, wires that carry music and light. My entrails are streets busy with traffic. The four chambers of my heart: one, a prison, dark with the solitude of the dead; one, a church, pale with sterile prayers; one, a hospital, red with the groans of the ailing, and the odours of drugs; one, a courtroom, blue with its prolonged trials and neutral judgments. How shall I describe the port of my nose where scents unfold their sails, the untiring mills of my teeth that grind the harshest of griefs, the market of my tongue full of noises and flavours, the observatory of my skin that records every change of season in its language of signs, the garden of my hairs where the sun never rises, the towers of my legs brimming with stilled dances, the office of my hands peopled with clerks and files, the sleepless factories of my glands and the busy junctions of my joints? In this city are the cries of birth and the groans of death, the temptings of the pimp and the gospels of the saint, the bargaining of the merchant and the detachment of the monk, caged forests and chained springs, clouds that rain at a touch and cuckoos concealed in mother-of-pearl, the wounds of departures and the wonders of arrivals, the inns of kisses and the zoos of emotions. Remember: when you burn this body, you are burning a city. Remember: when you bury this body you are burying a people.