Love of Damage

It's better if I go to bed with minor
injuries - it is like sex but cleaner.

It's better if some days I sport raked skin
or a bruise that is lemon or gentian,

since I wake up healed when I go to sleep dying
from backache, or blisters that hatch into scarring,

or a graze sustained when I scabbed, with minor
violence, some of my flatmate's dinner.

Perhaps because scraping through semi-intact,
injuries itching, is icing on caked

blood ' and when the blood cracks like sugar
shells, it's the basis, like sex is the trigger

for marriage, for death. And sleep is, in a
way, much like being buried, but cleaner.