Body Language

by Emma Freeman

How many words live inside my body?

How many layers are there

germinating, composting, regenerating

in this moment?

Whose words are they? 

Where did they come from?

They enter from different thresholds

My mind is a doorway

My eyes and my ears are doorways

My skin and my cells are doorways

Traveling through my body 

some swirl like smoke

while others loop in seemingly endless 

obsessive circles all day long

Some spark warmth in my heart

like an unexpected internal sunrise

while others land with a thud against my lungs

making me catch my breath

as I feel their sharp edges sink into me

In some moments

words flow together in streams of consciousness

that seem to fill my entire inner landscape

While in other moments

the words feel like giant scattered stones

broken bridges and rusty cages

If I had been born in another place on this planet

what words would be held inside this body?

If I had grown up speaking ancient words

how would that lineage be part of my body’s language?

Would my soul express itself differently?

Would it inherently reach for words with deeper roots

for ones with a richer ancestry of meaning?

And would those words

fill my body differently somehow? 

Would they shape it from the inside out

and shift what my eyes see

and what my ears hear

creating an entirely different sense of reality

and who I think I am?