My Invisible Skin

 My Invisible Skin

(“I’ve said these things to you so that you will have peace in me. In the world you have distress. But be encouraged! I have conquered the world.” John 16:33)

It isn’t guilt these days,
it’s the suffering, the sheer pain of squeezing
the most moments from each slant of the sun.
Do I miss friends who no longer understand?

I once had a plastic model, a man with invisible skin.
Inside were the organs: stomach and liver and arteries and veins.
I never learned much from him, or from the frogs I dissected in school.
All their insides blended in dirty wash-water grey.
It is fortunate I am not a physician.

At any rate I wish there was a picture window
to my soul
and it could be viewed dispassionately,
entirely undressed.
I would no longer need to rehearse my
answers, no longer hide what gathered dust
in the rafters. And I would be happy to sit still
for every x-ray snapshot.

Scolding never healed a headache,
surprise inspections alter few behaviors.
If you could see through my plastic skin
would you dissect my present from my past?
Would you think my last iteration was more
tattered than the first?

In the end it matters little,
though surgeons have whittled away at
a few of my organs.
My within remains intact,
my invisible skin only covers
a mosaic whose colors sometimes change
but whose essence has remained the same.