Refraction.

The Itch.

It becomes too much,
But too little can cause it too:
My skin crawls, mind hazy,
A lust for pain.
Steel blades glint beneath candlelight,
And my arm leaks crimson,
Though it has grown resistant to the sharpness,
So each time I press harder;
Harder, so that the crimson spills out of the cuts,
Not just rising feebly, to dry in place.
Slash, and the itch grows,
But, should I ignore it, something worse begins to grow;
Something more dangerous, more irreversible,
Than a little bit of blood.
It is only blood, and the blade is thin, so the scars don't particularly show-
Only under bright light, but it's easy to hide away from the sun:
The itch cannot be escaped.
Sometimes it leaves for months at a time,
And sometimes it returns every few hours,
But what more is there to say?
This is coping, for it keeps the intention to die at arm's length.
I am doing the best that I can to live with this itch,
For I doubt it will ever go away.
My illness is not a product of some external factor;
I am hardwired to function this way, biology
Cannot simply be rewritten, and even if it could,
I know not whether I'd give in to the temptation
Of living like the fortunate majority.
There is ingenuity
In difference;
There is also an itch to create something beyond
What those 'normal' brains could come up with,
An itch to solve problems in ways that would never
Have occurred to them...
There is nothing inherently and entirely bad,
Not illness nor disability, not difference nor similarity,
And this desire to 'cure'
Anything beyond the norm
Stops people like me from using our talents, our skills:
If we are not harming anybody else,
What gives you the right to harm us?