Self injury is no joke.

Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor’s cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.
Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.
It hurts.
Splashes on the pale gold tile,
bright red bursts like sunlight,
like exclamation points—Another Error!
I wrap a small towel around my wrist.
A small towel indicates a small error.
Soaked through
the towel’s gold is tarnished.
There is an innocent joy in the blood’s
flow that the towel and I cannot absorb.
These spurts, worth twenty dollars a pint
on the market, sense themselves unmarketable now.
Another towel wrapped tight in terror
slows everything down. On a blue velvet
love seat from which love has wandered I
sit waiting. I am an angel with an alert
backbone. I am purified from the business
of panic.