Suck Back

She used to scrape layers off.
Not to see
What might be hiding
Not the action of a curious child,
Art restorer,
Psychoanalyst.
She would scrape layers of her self,
Her own self, away,
Hard and fast.
Swing knuckles
Against grey granite
Garden walls.
An exchange,
She thought of it as.
In return
For the stones in her stomach
Her drowned brown eyes
The fleas that slowly
Stole her mind away
And of course the flakes of skin,
Those dead
And alive cells
That lay spread
Along town walls
She gained colour and passion
In thin tracks of seeping red
That left her knuckles
Sort of
Wrong-looking, weak,
But made her proud she was a fighter