The skin, a ghostly canvas of pinprick pores

and watercolour wash of tiger’s hide.

Stark and white as the surgeon’s gauze.

All accept the hands.

I’d pull off my foot, along with my shoe

I’d nurse at my thumb

and bore my tooth through

then I’d pull out my teeth so I’d no longer eat

Who can tame my waters once they decide to rise? Not I.

Not whilst they mar my coffer with ferocious, ferric fists,

thrashing at my ticker’s tides,

braiding, my vessels knots and twists.

It would find me in my childhood bed, in a rite of faithless prayers.

The ones I’d whisper in beat-full little slants,

into the bosom of my pillow;

Who would not accept my head, until I paid it’s toll

It is today that I put my name to them,

those destructive little rituals.

Today that I baptize them in a dry and sable font,

so they can no longer live

The wind creeps in, momentarily,

warning me, with sharp severity,

to fill the gaps

and trace the curves,

He jerked at her arms as she reached for the door,

dropping her strings so she’d crash to the floor,

He howled and he smiled as he toyed with his prey,

just to immure her in his cerebral castelet.

The house was still

until the wind came to visit,

its barked claws raking at fastened windows

rapping at the panes and picking at the locks.

How I wish not to consume myself with rituals of my own creation,

not to feel the grinding intricacies of my tiring mind

scream and tense, like contorted boughs, from my fingertips

I pushed my head against the glass,

and felt it rattle in its frame.

How, I wondered, would it feel,

should it suddenly give way?

You are the cause and the cure,

the beat and the tear,

the tug on the strings

which sting