You Have To Take Off Your Armor For The Strip Search
If you don’t peel your cloths off like an orange rind, they will take kitchen shears to that second layer of skin, to find the wet, pulsing pulp of you underneath the t-shirt. Their eyes will be metal detectors, jutting at every square millimeter of the landscape formerly known as your body. They run fingers over bottle caps and sea glass, dig into the love notes from dinosaurs carefully carved into the fleshy inner slice of arms, incase the Exacto is fossilized underneath one. Their owl eyes could trip over a landmine to send pieces of us spinning out to the waiting room, our collective filaments and electrically frayed heart strings a surprisingly appropriate confetti to welcome the next batch of patients. But they only found Richard the third’s spine questioning underneath the newly poured pavement of my back, they picked me over for banana peels and tucked away cocktails of brightly colored clown pills, captain and diets consecrated with a wedge of lime, locked it all behind my lips to make a compost pile of my mouth. Dressed me again in clothes that no longer fit, and set me down in a cinder blocked room with no lights, declaring me a plot who was picket fence ready.
