—I am a Wounder at Heart
I have so much that I haven’t been sharing with you! That seems to be my problem lately: sharing.
Last night I came home to my room drunk and it was dark so instead of turning on a lamp I hit my face on the wall. I felt it swelling and then looked at my hand and saw that it had blood all over it. I took some pictures and went to sleep, without doing anything about my wound or the blood.
Today, after cleaning myself up, I wrote a song about it.
I went to sleep outright bleeding,
when it was clear that
i should have been seeking
a patch for the part in my skin
a patch from the pouring of what still
remains of my dead kin
(the ones who left no traces
save genetic imprints,
which is greater
than any impermanent creation
like an empire, or a song
like a sculpture, or a god).
I fell asleep without damming the tear;
as I was crossing my own cheek
and getting caught
in my own hair.
This morning I spent
half an hour damping
soaks of tissue paper
picking at myself
(or, at least, what I had become)
passing between my room and the bathroom,
self-conscious being,
self-conscious about being seen;
the clotted mat in my brow was at first such a pain to remove,
but I scratched against the grain in place
and the blood granulated all over my face
like the crumbs of stale fudge
falling down to my lap
one mass displaced to many fractions of that.
