Please Confirm You Are Not a Body

At the gate, the scanner took my thumbprint
and left me the thumb.

The lobby asked me to select
all squares containing traffic lights.
I chose the capillaries in my eyes,
the red exit sign,
the small red dot on every message
waiting to hatch.

Please confirm you are not a body.

First came the courtesy updates:
less sleep, fewer windows,
a mouth that opened on schedule.
My calendar placed a clean forearm
between hunger and the hand.

By ten, my chair had grown
a second spine for me.
By noon, my wrists gave off
the warm-plastic smell
of a toy left on a dashboard.
Keys shone where my name
had been worried out of them.

Please confirm you are not a body.

The system admired efficiency.
So I made myself efficient:
salt cached in the collar,
jaw set to silent,
knees signing the stairwell agreement,
lungs accepting the room’s stale weather.

In the meeting, my face arrived late.
It pixelled on the wall
while I sat underneath it, obedient,
watching my mouth agree
from a delay of several seconds.

Someone said capacity.
Someone said resilience.
Someone said human capital
and glanced, kindly, at my ribs
as if counting chairs.

The body began failing honestly.

It sweated over the sensor.
It shook during password recovery.
It sent fever in place of data,
rash in place of signature,
a cough that opened every hidden tab
and would not close.

Please confirm you are not a body.

When the screen asked for buses,
I selected the ribcage:
each bar holding its passenger of breath.

When it asked for chimneys,
I chose the wrists.

When it asked for bridges,
the tongue.

When it asked for bicycles,
I clicked both knees, those rusted arguments
for leaving.

Then came the final test:
nine blank squares,
my face broken evenly among them.

I did not choose the face.

I chose the crack running through all nine.
I chose the rain on the glass.
I chose the hand outside the grid,
knocking once,
then not again.