Proprioception - Lukas Quinn
poem read by Timothy Arliss OBrien
Proprioception
(Feels Like a Bumblebee)
Lukas Quinn
In my skin:
Twitching under sheets
Spasmic - Bombastic
I cannot sleep
Without enwrapping my body
Restriction - Anti-stimulant
To forget I’m not parasympathetic
I’m embarrassed to admit
I’m no good at tying knots
I itch to be
External - Autovigilant
Swaddled perpetually
Without strings so loosely strung
If I could, I’d reroute my spinal cord
To ostensibly hang me (as a puppet) from my hollowed-out neck
Would I feel connected then?
Should I feel connection then?
Alas, I’m a brown-bruised banana, colored by faux pas.
You see, I walk wrong, hit my elbows on door frames
I must keep my shins a foot (at least) from table legs
And always tuck my knees on public transport.
Yup. Two left feet, every toe stubbed
On the soccer field, cause I’m picking daisies.
To pass to me is to pass it to the other team.
I’ve just discovered that I cannot twiddle thumbs behind my back.
In your skin:
I’m sorry; I’m really trying, dude. I am!
Fuck, man. I’m sorry; I keep fucking dying.
Which button is the X again?
Oh, there is no X. It’s a square on this controller.
Is this supposed to be fun?
Oh, it’s an acquired type of fun.
A long-learnèd fun
With prerequisite capacities.
The kind of fun you flex from birth and grow and train and that your mind and body should articulate bubbling under your skin as your sensation expands and asserts itself in neuroplastic flesh and every so often in these adult-ish days you can shake it up / shake up the Mountain Dew bottle and collide all those exuberant bubbling oxygen molecules / all those moves you’ve saved in your muscle memory as you grew up with a 5th grade best friend in his basement with his Pokémon cards strewn on the floor with thumb wrestling matches that you both win sometimes but mostly you win Madden on the PlayStation 2.
That kind of fun.
The kind of bubbling fun to which my body is numb, deprived of the proper oxygen.
///
Sometimes I forget to breathe. Sometimes I forget that there are fingers on both of my hands. Sometimes I forget I have proportions — to me they are foreign. I was given flat schematics for a 3D automaton.
I think my limbs twitch in the night just to remind me
That we are still connected.
