Experiments in Living

He could stay awake for hours, he lied.
Anyone could – the human body, capable of
amazing things.

He would tell stories of people lost in deserts and
the dehydration they endured. That news story
he once told us, of a girl drinking her father's urine,
the inversion, the horror of seeing it in front of her,
rise to her,

(he described it like this)

nausea bubbling in her throat.
Her father's shame at his own arousal.
No, we said, urine doesn't slake thirst, the nephron -
I know, he said. The human body can do
dreadful things.

We challenged ourselves, tested the endurance
of our frames. The pain test: burning each other,
pinching each other, eyes hot for ourselves.
We arranged cushions beneath us and held our breath
until we fainted, waking up next to each other laughing,
our lungs blowing up with the sheer joy of use.

And we fasted. We became skin and bones, loved the
trace of our skeletons beneath the elasticity of our skin,
pressed our bodies like grave-rubbings, dating ourselves
like carbon copy: old before our time.

For our last experiment, we stayed awake for days,
dreaming with our eyes open, but without seeing anything,
dribbling, heads flopping like dying fish.
Hallucinating, we all agreed that the landscape of the human body
was a beautiful thing. We could do
beautiful things.

So we knew the reaches of our bodies, our margins and faculties;
we taught ourselves how to exist - every day feeling
the shock of our talents shiver through us like a
cut membrane.