Poems for the Broken

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Sometimes you create an unstoppable habits, like puffing a cigarette after dinner.
Or running bath water so hot it stings your skin,
and it becomes an urge that compels you, like trying to find your next
hit of coke or running the tips of your fingernails across your skin.

Back and forth
Back and forth.
Watching your hand glide across your skin.
The stupidest things make you feel inadequate,
so you run your nails down the underside of your wrist to deliver the pain you've
felt since you were
Nine
years old.
And you felt sorrow for the first time.
So you run the nails down the underside of your wrist to make the anxiety stop,
and you can breathe again.

You've gone so long without coming up for air it has become toxic in your lungs.
You begin to gag because the so called "fresh air" is not the poison you have grown
accustomed to.

So you drive your nails deeper down your arm, running them faster and faster
gaining speed in order to break the skin.
You try to stop the pain from when you got slut shamed even though, at the time,
it was the only thing that made you feel alive.
Changing the direction you run the nails down your skin;
feeling the water that means you've started to break through.

It dilutes the pain of every loss you have ever had because maybe people
aren't dying but the sure as hell aren't sticking around.
You feel the pain as break the skin, and it is a stinging, throbbing pain
that doesn't seem to compare to a knife.
No, a cut doesn't show you exactly where your fingernails dug up
layers upon layers of pain that has become your skin.

But you don't stop running your fingernails down the underside of
your wrist trying to diver the pain of your heart fighting with your
head; saying that you are alone.

So you dig and scrape deeper and further as you find that.
You are alone.