This Time

 I started cutting that day. I was sixteen.
I’d read about the concept somewhere.
I bought a pack of razors at the store,
wondered if the female cashier knew.

I was in love. He dressed like Edward
Scissorhands. He’d been abandoned
as a baby in an apartment with two other
infants and they were found eating soap.

I would just sit behind him on the concrete
while he strummed “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
Holding onto him, I knew it was my purpose,
that I would be happy in his distance, his cruelty forever.

He would never be able to love,
and my mom would stop loving me, too,
because I loved him. And I found out
something about myself, that beauty

was somehow too beautiful for me, it made
me sob and clench my teeth in seething pain,
it ate away at me, emanated from my body
in ethereal tentacles of overwhelming sorrow.

Some years later I would write a 400-page novel
for him, and somehow in the book it ended up
that his character would cut my character’s
face when they made love.

We never made love. I remember his kisses.
The one time I had him in my mouth.
This morning was the residual of another dream of him,
too real, as if I were sixteen all over again.

I have thick welts on my arms today.
Two faint scars on my cheeks.
I remember the seeming release the cutting gave.
It seemed worth it then.

I remember the heartwrenching torment of cassette
mix tapes. Morissey and Robert Smith somehow
knowing my insides, precise words and haunted voices
torturing me with my own yearning.

So please please please
Let me, let me, let me
Let me get what I want
This time