Bridget Khursheed

talking about how blood moves

Your body is a machine,
it works. Ducts, pipes, tissue, tubes,
the heart belching blood —
a saggy bucket
connecting to three more —
it is impossible to regulate
pressure up and down
and failing
eventually

into holding pools
or furred
and weed-clogged canals
to idly loop in the defunct, yes,
industrial complex
and stop.

Your body is not a machine,
the way your heart works
is not architecture and
not a river system
but this map of tattered colours
embracing all the ports,
the moors, heath, marshes, mountain pass,
deserts and the sea;
not a road, no, not even
the movement of cars
ribboning through
a long high street;

the commute to
necessary extremities.
The smeared space between
wheel or foot or road and destination
is life itself:
the push forward
flux of messages exchanged

a hurriedly made-up parcel
and the desperate race back home.

Bridget Khursheed is a poet and geek based in the Scottish Borders; a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award recipient for poetry, her work is widely published in magazines including The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, New Writing Scotland, Ambit, Zoomorphic, and Gutter; she is studying for an MSc in cybersecurity. She tweets @khursheb.