Year of the Tiger: Happy Chinese/Vietnamese New Year!

Shrik*

looking at a somewhat older version
of myself
stretched like a rubber band

(a balloon,
a bobbing Jack-in-the-Box,
an alien with fish eyes,
a starving child,
a battered wife,
an elderly gazing at daisies
                on the hospital's lavender walls)

my skin wrapping tightly
to my cheeks
and I found myself
hollow

screaming and screaming and screaming
without end
into Munch's canvas

I'm afraid of my own portrait,
seeing my own frailty and abandonment
like crumbling acrylic paint
into bones and ashes,

which vultures and ravens pick and peck,
pick and peck on
until I am no longer an alphabet

but spirit


*Based on a very strange dream I had last night.