Chemical Submission

Sans conveyance I have borne
starbursts of cities
fractured glimpses through corridors
dusted by radioactive moments—
they are burned into flesh,
scars decaying day by day into
crisscross mementoes of empty rooms
injections of imagination
twisting hubris and atomized madness
into something vaguely human.

Time and again, different forms
submit to the chemistry
a blink, a drip, a flash of substance
that supplants substance—
I am bled dry of the same things
these streets once ran with:
we are each of us divided,
into cells, remnants skeletal
as captives of science,
one preserved and one destroyed.


—Chris Galford