Welcome

When you cut into your own flesh
that sweet horror of first seeing
your own blood, released
from its private blue branches
into blooms turned red
by the numbered breaths of air
and dropping wet petals,
impresses every dream.

You visit dark places where shadowed
figures torture confessions from you
drawing their bows across your troubled skin
to release the wild chords of panic
that precede trust.
You give yourself over to their silver incisions
just as you gave your left wrist to your right hand
while awake. You crave private lights,
that is why they chose you.

If you survive this, they whisper in your ears
having taken your eyes away with a black velvet binding,
if you trust, we are initiating you
to the mystery, and that were we cut
you’ll find the scars resemble
a terrible love, you’ll see
you were always blind Before.

You wake to the indiscriminant morning sun
and sob, wanting again to lay prostrate to the night
with the sharp and painful blades slipping into you
threading you in fellowship with sufferers of intensity,
Lover’s of mystery who squeeze each other’s hearts
in new rhythms and expect no less in return;
you sob because you cannot hold a candle
to the sun, so proud and too bright to see
the glorious nuance of shadows and privacy.
You want to sleep again, sleep weekly,
that when you one day walk out of those doors
that lock behind you, you will know
it is not about what you have lived through,
simply that you lived at all, something seen best
in the dark that flickers with wrists and razors
like links in a chain full of trust, full of faith
in the power of humanity to know life
as life can only be known: by facing death with love
in good company.