Resurrection Wounds

The Autopsy of the Life I Buried

I devoured myself from the inside out,

my marrow hollowed by hunger no substance could fill;

throat raw from swallowing fire,

veins collapsed like abandoned mineshafts.

I carved my epitaph with needles and bottles,

buried dreams under mountains of white powder,

became the undertaker of my own potential.

Each morning: resurrection of the damned.

Skin yellowed parchment stretched over borrowed time,

eyes drowned in blood-red tides.

Each morning, I'd wake to the same corpse in the mirror,

eyes like vacant tombs, skin a map of collapsed veins.

I watched myself decompose in real time,

the mirror becoming a mausoleum

where I'd visit what remained.

My body, this traitor-temple,

this cathedral of self-immolation

where I kneeled before chemical gods,

offering flesh as kindling.

I baptized myself in vomit and night sweats,

communion of bile and broken promises.

I carried death inside me like a second heartbeat,

counted time in doses not days,

measured worth in how much poison my body could withstand.

My children wept silently on the other end of calls

I never answered. Their tears fell in another universe

where love still mattered.

The eulogy played on repeat in my child's voicemails

I never returned.

I could not hear them through the screaming

of my cells as they died in droves,

a genocide of my own making.

The funeral procession never ended;

friends retreating from the viewing,

family holding vigils for someone still breathing.

I was the ghost haunting my own body.

Time dissolved into an endless corridor

of bathroom floors, their cold tiles

pressing tombstone shapes into my cheek.

I carved my history into track marks and abscesses,

my biography written in bruises and overdoses.

My heartbeat, a war drum slowing toward silence.

Sometimes I'd catch glimpses of who I was before,

like photographs slipped between coffin cushions.

The memory of laughter that didn't need chemical ignition,

hands that created instead of destroyed,

a voice that spoke truth instead of crafting elaborate lies.

I exhaled ghosts of who I used to be.

They hovered above me like smoke,

dissipating memories of potential

and purpose. Clarity. Connection.

Dreams not drowned in false twilight.

I died a thousand times.

In bathroom stalls.

On strangers' couches.

In tents on sidewalks.

In hospital beds with charcoal in my stomach.

In the silence between heartbeats when everything almost stopped.

Then, breaking through soil and bone,

a seedling of surrender.

Not white flag weakness but the violent courage

of a woman clawing upward from her own grave,

fingernails splitting on coffin wood,

lungs burning for air unpoisoned.

But decomposition has its own strange magic-

cells breaking down to feed what comes after.

I found resurrection in surrender,

in admitting I'd been conducting my own burial for years.

I vomited demons for forty days and nights,

my body purging death in convulsions holy and profane.

Each withdrawal a crucifixion,

each craving denied a resurrection.

I bled redemption through every pore.

The first honest breath felt like desecrated ground

pushing up wildflowers.

Now I exhume myself daily,

brush dirt from bones that survived,

speak names of the dead parts I've learned to honor

without joining them.

Now I stand in the graveyard of my former selves,

each headstone a version I had to bury

to become this raw, reborn thing.

Still trembling. Still scarred.

Still whispering apologies to the organs that stayed,

the heart that refused to quit beating,

the brain that remembers the wreckage.

My body remembers how to be a temple instead of a tomb,

my blood runs clean like spring water through mountain stone.

I touch my chest and feel warmth

where once there was only ash.

I am phoenix-man, born from the pyre

I built from my own bones.

My hands, once death dealers and self-destroyers,

now cup water, hold truth, reach outward.

I've learned to consecrate the wreckage,

to build altars from the debris.

I used to be a funeral for myself.

Now I am the savage miracle of aftermath;

a cathedral rebuilt from rubble,

a psalm sung by the voice that once only screamed,

a body that rises, rises, rises

despite everything it knows about falling.

Now I am the resurrection;

scarred and humbled and fiercely alive,

tending to the garden that grows

where my grave was meant to be.