like a virus dormant in the nerves
I carry but can’t know
my economic curse:
slow growth.
In the scrapheap of my heart,
wrecked cars,
deposits of my heavy metals.
Unpetalled
as a Round-Up flower,
in the hour
I read of all the chemicals in me,
scraped from the bottom of a frying pan.
I am
so full of rare minerals I may
myself be colonised one day
by big guns and high ideals.
Real
grate of microplastics in my brain,
swallowed razorblade,
my infertility which grows
pregnancy-slow,
cancers intimately mine,
give me some sign
the water had been poisoned and I drank,
so I know who to thank.
But the language shows the way
inevitably rhyming pain
with rain
and with delay