The famine started long before this soul could read,
letters giving way to patterns,
stolen colours mixed with second hand scraps
and fashioned as freedom.
A skin that falls away from the bones
to expose the starved sinews, weak from sneaking sensations
in all the wrong places.
Months spent as an empty shell
longing for the sea,
weighed down with sand and plastic wrappers;
cheap treasure, shallow digger.
All that tickles and thunders was buried deeper underground
but detecting only shadow signals
instinct gave way to injured impulse
and lay dying in final defence of the once courageous heart
who lost its rage to a captive life
in a weather-beaten cage and severed from the body,
power seeping out the cells into a muddy puddle on the floor.
But home is where the heart is,
even when it fights back at a crawl
this body will regrow limbs, applying medicines
to clot the blood back into these veins
and the whispers of the wild woman
will echo through each chamber of the heart,
breathing gulps of handmade air
just to howl at the moon.