inspired by "pilgrim at tinker creek"

i am escaping (and just barely)
walking free toward freedom
and not without catching the edged teeth,
the beveled scraping claws of
capitalism's predators, the reaching most-on-top of this dominant culture shitstorm
i, none of us, are exactly "okay" "unharmed," "whole," exactly
and what if wholeness was the accident near birth,
and not its fracturing?
it is hard to find an unmarked hide, they say,
an 8-legged daddy long leg, impossible,
"the scarred hides of living whales, striated with gashes as long as my body, and hilly with vast colonies of crustaceans called whale lice"
so many things are trying to live all together!

is it such a surprise that some humans would think they have to kill,
scrape scrabble step on heads to get by--
some live on blood, others on sun.
and something always dies to feed, "it is chomp or fast."
"harvest or starve," might say.
of course we the living have narrowly escaped becoming food a thousand thousand close times!
every day at least one escape!
our bodies food for trains, roadrage, bears, hungry crevasses, sustained despair, disease's fecundity, contagion's desperation,
our eyes prey for the self-immolating cold fire of TV, the endless litany of scandal and porn and the blinding consumptive brilliance of Christ or a Burning Man or a bomb's wake,
our hands feed for machines
our hearts playing dead, delectable to oh so many kinds of critter, iron beast fame-gods--

oh oh in a world ruled by these gods (which?)
(any?)
we have narrowly escaped with numbered scars hidden and showing
don't stop now
(the embroidery on our earlobes)
don't stop now

here's my question,
where did it grab you as you slipped away?
at your neck or your head, your ankle or your heart, your wings?
which part of yourself did you almost leave behind?