Bleeding Spiteful Strife

The cost of a pearl is the life of its maker,

The cost of my love is peace of spirit, of bone,

Unknowing of how to give of myself

Without giving greater,

I am left casting myself before carved stone

Unknowing of how to stand without the tension of grief,

I wonder who I will be if I let it sweep over me?

How do I deliver myself from angers timely hold?

The concrete on my back,

Past Decembers growing cold

How can I be all,

The womb, new flesh and midwife?

Am I not my mother

With a back but no knife?

Exorcized at the cost of my own preservation,

Ego speaks as if the body and soul

Starve for the same bright light

I don’t know how to be without you to bear witness to my self-mutilation,

My poetry pulled out of me like a hook from a fish bleeding spiteful strife