Brink

Pain, pain, that wonderful warning:
Danger! Something’s Wrong.
Stop, turn around, log out, run away;
I shouldn’t feel like this.

I ignore the jangling bells within my skull.
Pain is welcome, pain cuts through
this dense steam of summer sweat and confusion
through which I stumble, one hand over my eyes
for surely I can see better that way.

Silly girl, lost in her poetry.
What are words but tools;
hammers, pins, blunt scalpels
that fail to isolate the source
but cut deep anyway.
No blade held by me will ever again brush my skin
but the rounded stroke of my pen on paper
works well enough

and as I pour more of me onto the page
my vessel of a body only drinks more
life from other sources—not my own.
Ha! What life is here? I laugh;
my face stays blank as fired clay.
I leech my parasitic days from the veins of those around me.
I remain bound to my ever-present notebook,
bent over the college-ruled pages
transcribing crudely translated bits of thought.
Who could know what I really meant?
It doesn’t matter now; I live
by those sweetly assuming words.
Who could know if they were ever true?
They are now.