OCD (Dermatillomania)

 
People talk about OCD in humour,
'advantageous', 'I'd love to be',
'I bet your house is always clean',

I want to hear folk talk about the insidious forms,
hair pulling, skin picking, eyelash plucking -
about what it takes to wretch from the inside out,
how heat from beneath the surface
boils like volcanoes looking for more space,
how fingers become weapons,
mirrors the scene of a crime,
how some folk long
to remove their nails
straight from the beds with tweezers,
how tweezers would need to also be banned -
if it was an option, heck knows,
I'd dig for it.
People talk about OCD
as if it's exclusively light switches,
door knobs, step counting, sound,
not the sight of red and white,
the picturing of small cells
exiting through revolving doors,
the abnormality left
more irritating than the one before -
a cavity existing
only to be bleached below the Sun.
Some people don't talk about OCD at all,
they bury it
so deep no one would know that they even have it,
would assume,
while they'll take creams and tablets and vials,
that it's all a hormone imbalance, lack of washing or
a skin anomally.
Some people won't talk
about a childhood spent
pinned down,
a parent pickled in trauma
picking them until light
peeled through crochet curtains,
how they'd search for faces in wallpaper
to block out relentless pain,
they won't talk about the screaming,
face pushed in pillow,
nor the weeping,
nor the fetal,
nor the aftermath,
see - it's just OCD,
it's just cleaning -
how derma
becomes dermatillomania,
I hear some folk say it's burrowed in shame.