Meditation on a Blood Stain

in the morning, the gray cloth is pained, twisted, and disrupted / or, in the morning, the gray cloth is

tie-dyed in the silent stream / that formed last night / when a vein of mine changed course and leaned into

gravity / sinking downhill until it found a warm place to squat, found a head tossed back, neck tugging at a

gentle jawline and lips halfway parted / which is to say

____

the mouths of rivers will do nothing to demand your attention

except flow, will merge with ponds or oceans and never assert their own power

the more powerful thing being that I know to listen to something that does not

present the athletics of its violence to me competitively, that the kind of blood

that blooms rather than cuts knows how to glean a limp carcass from an

ocean floor, is more concerned with healing than with conquest and yet

every surrounding object is pulled into its orbit anyway and isn’t there

a metaphor in that somewhere? don’t we all end up

learning from our own bodies, the ensnaring

of yet undecorated cloth for no reason

except nurture and the collection

of puddles that look like flower

petals peeking out of a riverbed?

____

sometimes, I am overtaken by

the red mass carving at my

insides: it wrinkles me

makes me dull

I am clumsy and do not think that this is help

or beauty

I am forgetful and think that my body of water has become the pain

but a thinner liquid ushers two numbing pills down my throat

and as aggression calms

my river is still not

drowning