all the places hidden so deep you’d have to rip them out to find

By Sydney Johnson

These are pieces of a person that you can have, that you can hold and examine.

talk to them, don’t talk to them. they’re undecided like that, no one’s figured it out yet. you’d have to crawl around their insides to understand. pick and rip apart all the places stuffed into the figure made of bone marrow and aching teeth called human

: 

a broken nervous system traded for bouncing legs and spider fingers / a brain / dashing / sprinting / running away from thoughts / useful thoughts / useless thoughts / needed thoughts / thoughts buried deep in their body / thoughts for no one to see / suspect / hear / you’d see anger boiling over somewhere / somewhere obvious / stained alligator green in color and alligator green in its ridges / furious in heat / almost spilling onto the ground, almost because it will break one day / and that is one thing everyone knows /

/ you’d see sparking muscle tissue / you’d hear it burst / pop rocks on a live wire / wires which seldom work due to the condition of the nervous system / it makes their reactions rare and big / energy pushing out in the form of strange habits / a sentence spoken so fast and loud it is mumbled and quiet / kicked feet / music drowning nerves so well it does nothing but make them worse / counterproductive / a counterproductive stuffed figure of bone marrow and flesh and aching teeth / a body that does not want to work with itself

there are examples of this

:

these you can take / these you can rip out of them / many others will shrivel up and die dead inside of them as things go to do in the ocean /

a setter needs wrists and speed / this figure offers neither / slow movements and wrists which strain themselves holding grocery bags / wrists in which, / if you sawed through enough of their veins and swam through enough blood, / you would see half severed tendons torn apart by the scavengers who live in the rotting flesh / the reasons for the unearthed parts of them / the parts even they don’t want to see / defense mechanisms

a guitarist needs hand-eye coordination and wrists / you already know about the wrists / what you do not know of the coordination / this can be destroyed outside of them / they have fine hand-eye coordination / better than average even (except what is better than average fades away as time moves them inevitably along) / but when their nails grow too long and start cracking under the weight of being alive / the weight of moving and all the other byproducts of being alive / it slips away from them like math and being content did / and when the nail clippers meet and chop nail / chop a piece of the figure called human / hand-eye coordination gets wrapped in the tissue and thrown into the trash with it /

/

all of these not-so-secrets make up the figure stuffed of made up words called human are them / are pieces of them / pieces of a not-so-human / pieces of a human who does not know what it means to be human but knows the terror of being pieced together and found out / the terror of being known and had 

/ 

/ pieces of condensed thought and secret lodged in flesh and foolishly called person /

Process

I wanted to explore secrets and what might make up a person. I’ve always thought that every experience a person has makes up or, at least, builds upon their personality. I tried to explain that all the emotions and things that happen to a person gets stuffed into a body and becomes a human through this piece. What I think is interesting is that some thoughts I’ve heard from friends and adults wormed their way into my piece, and I think that explains the influence of experiences outside of yourself really well!