We're All Rotting Anyway, In Our Skeleton Leafed Costumes

Wrote a freewrite the other day about my fear for my health. Working on polishing it into a poem, here is draft two. I drew off an old story I wrote a few years ago about a tree for help with the portion of the poem that regards the death of that particular tree. Enjoy, friends.


We're All Rotting Anyway, In Our Skeleton Leafed Costumes

My insides are twisting, my organs rotting.
“We don’t know the cause,” the doctor said, “how to cure you, either.
We have some primitive ways of treatment though.” That’s one.
How about two?
Three.
This body is deforming.
How many more organs can I lose before I am no longer human?
My body told me; I told them.
Who would listen to a 17 year old girl when there are
experts
in the room?
I can feel this body dying all around me.

My tree was rotting on the inside. True, I had known for years.
That just never changed the way I looked for her silhouetted shadow for every kind of comfort.
She had been planted all wrong; an up-close inspection of the state of her leaves,
her bark
reported her quality of life was not quality at all.
“Its roots were never able to spread out,” father said, “they just dug straight down, spiral-like,”
and I imagined her great tentacles
thick and hard,
drying up in the rich wetness of earth below me.
I watched her –
steady and unmoving, dry in the season’s breeze.
Her leaves, brilliant shades of red and orange in their diseased dying hour;
her leaking fluids thickening, grown sickly in their decent of her crumbling body;
her once strong figure lost of its harbored companions as easily as she lost her skin, lost her breath when her lungs fell one by one to the roadside curve below.
When they began to dismember her limbs, her branches, in a systematic fashion
she looked to me in my second story brick-set window and cried:
“please! We’re all rotting anyway, in our skeleton leafed costumes!”

Baby brother, my blonde haired Connor,
black lady bug on your right clavicle, a mole, a birthmark.
A boy with failed insides. A dead boy. A boy who loved loved loved,
Now, a fourteen year old ghost at my hospital bedside, finger-tipping my wires,
my life-line needles.
Kissing my crown,
I promised I’d never will for anything but life.

All seventy-seven years of her.
I never saw a body decay like that before.
Her face was still vibrant, her features the same,
shifted with age.
It’s easy to see how the man fell in love.
A rainbow of pills against her old pursed lips, “I just want to live,” she said in her sleep,
her legs twitching, her hands placing imaginary bottles on imaginary shelves.
Just like her
just like Connor
like my tree
with my roots twisted and hallow,
I was planted all wrong. I’m rotting,
rotting.

Scalpel, check. Sutures, check.
Remove the infectious, remove the inflamed membranes,
the diseased organs fighting themselves.
Tiny white lines, professionally marked incisions, shining white.
How much longer till there is nothing left to remove?
I can feel this body dying all around me.
Right now.
Lower torso.
Left side.
Throbbing,
numbing
me.
Remove this!
Remove these grayed, sick organs,
owning me.
Holding me
in one place,
sending me
to doctors
to exams
to surgeries
alone.
With this
I am always alone.
One of the unlucky ones.
The alone ones.
The one that dies, rots from the inside out.
Alone.