I’m turning into a mummy- <br />It started in my left middle toe, the first symptoms <br />First the end got hard and dried out, <br />Skin flaking, like a callous, or a fungus. <br />I began craving pomegranates, dates; <br />Ordering fancy linen sheets by the dozen <br />Searching for natron, and exotic resins <br />Scribbling foreign- looking symbols <br />To mark my possessions. <br />Worrying whether or not, my heart is too heavy? <br />Now I can feel it creeping up higher, <br />The granite vise closing upon my flesh, <br />Every night while I pretend to be sleeping- <br />Though I seem to require much less sleep these days. <br />During daylight it hibernates, dormant <br />I think that the full moon makes it ravenous. <br />Once I saw an actual mummy in a clear case. <br />The card said she was a Princess- <br />Maybe that was somebodys imagination, <br />Because I have inside information: <br />The mummy tried to warn me within a dream <br />That we shared a past and, it follows, a future; <br />She was my sister in the dream, <br />We lived in a clay house with a dirt floor. <br />We were poor, in everything but dirt, and time. <br />It must have been long aeons ago we were there <br />In the desert, in the clay brick house, <br />And now, I am becoming a mummy too; <br />In three thousand years, the entire body <br />Metamorphosed into a sort of dry, desert-fired clay, <br />Maybe I too will have a glass sarcophagus; <br />And since I will have no pyramidal tomb, <br />The only name they might find about me <br />To place upon it: Princess AL-COTON 100% <br />Made in Taiwan.<br /><br />Patti Masterman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/metamorphosis-45/
