i.

Ceremony or surgery, perform for me, carry grief in these lungs, must be some room to make for healing to come in unimpeded, to take root and clean it out, this hurt spectre a heart hungering to be nurtured by every stranger my brain’s fever of suspicion dismisses when it should eviscerate into submission to feelings my apprehension paints my veins indigo with, ego tripping over its own illusion, bruising time’s passage so that only enough light to discern morose colour can enter, performances of remorse disintegrating ink of tears and ashes pitched with invisible splinters, permit me now, somehow, to surrender to the medicine of sustained unawareness, prepare for the unrepressing, the

                    ii.

unpacking, the redressing, the harrowing clarity of being hollowed out by not knowing how to go about marrowing to full cure bones broken by our own hubris, oh, how I sing to you Muse, of my own pain, mine is the eye you have to go through to view the world the way I do, find who it is I turn into when blind to those who choose for me what poses I refuse to conform to, casual erotics never serve so well those used to abusing themselves without benefit of an audience, forget bandages, you don’t even need to put a ring on it since I have so many already, every engraved

                    iii.

symbol a periphery, liminal agonies, festooned angles anguish consumes, false flames flagging red any of my claims to being worthy of being wed, entombed in my routine of digging through everything my teeth can’t already sink into, feasting on flesh the way philosophers dwell on the depths of their souls, predating on fools who trade pleasure for gold, for being told they taste better than every other who offered themselves on the altar of my appetite’s hunger before, if there exists anything more than settling for this, then it eludes me, tempts only what part of me my senses ignore, that place where hurt hurts only to be hurt waiting to be restored.