Sensitivity.

to live is to sacrifice

TW: descriptions of blood and other sensitive imagery.

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The shivers
that crawled,
the clenching of throat,
air once so salty, that surrounded me
now feels
like a forgotten memory,
wanting to be forcibly recalled.

I keep asking
it to take me,
to change me back to who I was,
before my heart grew cold.

Flesh becomes bone.

I trace back to the time
I first heard.
I didn’t know my skin.
I wasn’t told how to feel.

The blood doesn’t know how the bone gets carved.
neither does the bone.
so delicately raw.

With the decaying ones,
six feet under, is where
the bones are truly accepted.
not amongst the mortals;

amongst those that preceded the living,
the ones incapable of transforming.

Venom was born to kill,
It never stood to heal; it was destined.
incapable of transforming.

Its mother knew;
to live is to sacrifice.
so it birthed its blood to seek its life.
unforgivingly, morbidly, alive and existing.

washed in pain,
and suffering,
relenting to bleed, again and again.
—to live is to sacrifice.

It was only a matter
of time before I knew too.

Bone becomes flesh.

when it lets the blood etch it,
drowning its crevices.

it’s the kind of permission
that destroys the giver.
a desperation that kills,
when you’re utterly willing it.

I’ve memorized the rulebook
front
and back.
I know just about every turn of the game,
I know it enough to
let it not play me.

and that,
I wish to forgo.

I want
to forsake my guts,
my heart,
replacing them
with ones that haven’t shed a single tear.

I want to feel tender to pain
once more.
Draw my life,
between the edge of life and mortality
with cherry red threads,
engraved in fear. 

traces of innocence, clot
along the walls of my veins, 
the walls of which await to be burned. 
the flames call on me 
in ways the smoke can’t fog,

how long before I grow impatient 
imprisoned by the cold of my blood.  

I want the clot to bleed.
I want to feel.
again and again

until I flow, horridly free.

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