Vile and Fascinating
You sit at the keyboard.
It is a habit with you,
each day pricking yourself
to see where you bleed.
Rarely a pretty thing,
but it is your treatment,
your job,
the thing that keeps you alive, this pricking,
this causing of pain,
but not too much,
a balancing act of words and heart,
a revealing of details
without showing the corpse,
or at least the part of you that almost became
that corpse.
Survival it seems, is not pretty.
But it can be something else.
It can have meaning.
It can have purpose.
It can provide a release, a bloodletting of the soul,
vile enough to be true.
fascinating enough you can’t look away.
About this poem
I sometimes wonder if I reveal too much when I write. I sometimes wonder if I reveal too little. Then I just shrug and write.
The photograph was taken at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Tom
