I am a young boy shivering in an outgrown eggshell-nest. My breath stinks of milk and wet barn. I am tethered to this mother.

I am squinting at you like a corpse but I’m still beautiful.

If I were less cold and more feral, I would be able to slink off and imagine that I am a caged fox who wants to flee from the infinite reality of lives like mine.

I have lost my name. I am lost. I do not quite know what I have become but it is certainly not a person. I am not my body, and I will never know or be known by the body that gave birth to me.

When this mold sticks and tears to itself, so do the memories.

I am stitching together a farce.

I am putting together a fantastic, beautiful, sanitized version of who I was as a man.

I am leaving this messy organ that was my body behind, and I am embracing another form.

I am a young boy shivering in an outgrown eggshell-nest. My breath stinks of milk and wet barn. I am tethered to this mother.

I am being fed a baby bird’s leg bone from a Neighbour’s kitchen.

A bit dazed, but then when I look down into my shell, I see that I am floating in space.

Waiting on the edge of madness. When the mother feeds me, I am unconscious.

I am remembering stories I never lived and memories that I never had.

I am a dear friend of wild rivers, a perennial voyager.

I am hollowing out a mass for another form.

Wanting to be thrown from this soft body housing that I wouldn't mind being taken out of.

This mold is my shell.