These brief staccatos

I Cut Myself

After the holes have pierced through, a thousand wounds nourished naked in the mother, I take the brave little knives granted me by providence and circumstance and begin the business of letting red sand. They’ve taken the water from my blood, you see, surreptitiously siphoned the black milk that upwells from my heart and all that remains is a ghosted fossil of what passion and mistrust have imprinted there. It will never be enough.

Thus, this thin cutting to mark the time of what I may never be, the man I surrendered sanity to the boy for, the mensing of what dreams I imagine to savor when I am deep and alone in the null of night. I find myself reduced to subtitles in a French movie where every expression degrades to a wordworn impasse in conflict. I am an inverse love poem strangled outside itself unable to squeeze the sun for a kiss of martyred rain. Life lasts longer this way.

I cut myself from a lantern that scores the veil of a pestilent moon in precise silhouettes that evaporate from gas lit rues, the late clopping of horses on rough stone lost to the passing of histories never recounted, sealed into the parchment of still poets whose labors never once broke heraldic wax. The world would cut me in strange and unspeakable ways if I did not amend these brief staccatos into patterns I have grown such skin for. Salvation, they say, readily redeems one who abets his own demise. Death waits longer this way.

I drink more these days—vinegar to curry the sand, rock to aggregate the sift. These are the actions of a drowning man who believes air his mortal enemy. For a simple ocean I will set whetstone to work, salt for my salt, the worried surface of my blue hammered mettle to tirelessly throw stars back to the void they fell from. Watch if you must this cutting, this cutting of myself, the dire pleating of frail measures that unravel to disclothe me from a skein of fallibility where, for all the bright holes a heaven can conjure, not one gleams incidentally perfect.


Joseph Gallo
September 27, 2006