When the Body Turns on Itself

When the Body Turns on Itself

I’m sicker than sick—
the fever a furnace that burns the bones,
the cough a tide that drags the night‑air in.

My skin, once a parchment of habit, now cracks,
splintered by a thousand invisible saboteurs,
each one a whisper: you’re not enough.

Inside, the heart drums a war‑song,
a frantic metronome beating against a ribcage that
has taken up arms with the very blood that should sustain it.

The lungs, once gentle bellows, gasp for air like a child
who has swallowed the sky,
and the throat, a throat‑of‑thorns, spits fire‑scented words
that melt the calm of ordinary breath.

I lie in the quiet hum of fluorescent nightlights,
a battlefield lit by the sterile glow of monitors,
their beeps like distant drums urging me forward,
while my own pulse—my traitorous ally—stutters, then surges.

Every cell mutinies, a legion of rebellion,
throwing up fevers, chills, a fevered fog that clouds the mind,
yet in the marrow a stubborn seed persists:
survival is the only revolt I know.

I clutch the thin thread of resolve,
a ragged flag raised on a balcony of ribs,
and whisper to the chaos that swirls inside:

You may betray, you may bleed, you may burn,
but you cannot drown the stubborn ember
that flickers in the dark, stubborn as a candle—
the same flame that once lit my first sunrise.

So I will walk this thin line between collapse and rise,
learn the cadence of a body at war with itself,
and, when the fever finally lifts, I will taste—
the first, pure breath of peace, earned in the trenches of my own flesh.