S E L F - P O R T R A I T A S A N EGGSHELL

Owen Elphick

Self-Portrait as Egg Shell

Your emptiness, your cartilaginous fragments of a life before life. Papyrus-thin, you crumble at the touch. You were made to come apart.

Yellowed by the dirty air, purple spots pepper you, a chicken-pox pattern, a dull speckling. Your insides crusted with sand. Your curve.

Your collapse. Your folding into yourself like paper half-charred, yanked from the fireplace before total incineration. Flecking at the ashy edges and twisting into a fine, congealed dust. Left on the edge

of this marsh like litter, scattered beside a vast greenness. So small, it is a wonder you ever held anything.

Splintered by time and the unceasing birthing of things. Nothing is born without a breaking, and jagged shards stick from you like a shattered mirror.

Life hid in you once, stewed, boiled, grew, broke through, cracking you, leaving you vacant. And now you lie here, dead calcium, purpose complete.