Metamorphosis Poem by Patti Masterman

I’m turning into a mummy-
It started in my left middle toe, the first symptoms
First the end got hard and dried out,
Skin flaking, like a callous, or a fungus.
I began craving pomegranates, dates;
Ordering fancy linen sheets by the dozen
Searching for natron, and exotic resins
Scribbling foreign- looking symbols
To mark my possessions.
Worrying whether or not, my heart is too heavy?
Now I can feel it creeping up higher,
The granite vise closing upon my flesh,
Every night while I pretend to be sleeping-
Though I seem to require much less sleep these days.
During daylight it hibernates, dormant
I think that the full moon makes it ravenous.
Once I saw an actual mummy in a clear case.
The card said she was a Princess-
Maybe that was somebodys imagination,
Because I have inside information:
The mummy tried to warn me within a dream
That we shared a past and, it follows, a future;
She was my sister in the dream,
We lived in a clay house with a dirt floor.
We were poor, in everything but dirt, and time.
It must have been long aeons ago we were there
In the desert, in the clay brick house,
And now, I am becoming a mummy too;
In three thousand years, the entire body
Metamorphosed into a sort of dry, desert-fired clay,
Maybe I too will have a glass sarcophagus;
And since I will have no pyramidal tomb,
The only name they might find about me
To place upon it: Princess AL-COTON 100%
Made in Taiwan.