and so

​even now,
my body eats my words
like it ate my stomach lining and my muscles,
the apples from my cheeks,
the words from the insides of my skull:
my own all-consuming shame
sucking indecently on the greasy fingertips of memories
until this machine learned to
metabolize self-hatred into glucose,
distill fear into a dirty fuel--
until everything i say feels like it starts in the middle,
and finds itself too tired to reach the end