This is a prose poem that goes through all those behaviors we do that we know are good for us, beginning small and then progressing. 

The close of the poem:

[...] it's like waiting all year for your birthday, and when it finally comes, insisting on staying home, it's like that night, turning twenty-five in the garage, sitting on top of the dryer with a bobby pin between your fingers, biting off the soft part, spitting it out, letting the phone ring and ring, because all you want to do is this, just this.

Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let’s show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let’s tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark
round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles
picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punch line ‘Just like blood’
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.

Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor’s cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.

Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.

autumned nights

know
of the
torn wrist
b
l
e
e
d
ing
undercovers
the bloodshot eye
staring
at the orangelit glow of
3am.