The Body Politic

Is your body you, or are you your body?

I struggle with this question

whenever I examine my reflection

and the physical aftermath of the war

my body has waged with itself.

It was not always this utopic;

as a child, it was a vehicle I could not

maneuver; as a teen, it became a gulag

that lived and breathed and thought -

and, slowly, it plotted to overthrow me.

It rebelled without warning –

biological insurrection made me

an enemy of the state of my own mind.

I could not quell the internal uprising,

the self-sabotage of sex and cells and flesh.

My tyrannical development trapped me

within a prison of my own body –

a Bastille of bone and blood and bile.

Have you heard that every seven years,

our cells die, regenerate, renew?

It took me more than seven years to escape;

I was liberated by a Molotov cocktail

of blue and pink pills – incendiary sparks that

cracked my cell wide open and reconfigured it

into this paradise.

#thevenuscomplex #hrt #hormones #genderdysphoria #dysphoria #poetry