"Acupuncture"

"Acupuncture" 

Familiar sensation
I perceived would have become
foreign
after torn in to my skin.

Them:

Like needles from the floor
expanding in my pores
searching for the door
we should've crushed the key to.

We did our best
in pretense
to make sense of excess access.

Asked less from those
who would claim to know,
the show -
violently...exquisitely passionate
and grotesque -
is best performed in the light.
It saves face from the unassuming;
unaware of this
occasional exhuming
we put to task with. 

With 

the past

With

One asking the other.

I feel that lost time
pricking my spine
and chilling the skin.
Time never thin enough.
Awkward silence thick
enough
to press against the space between us:
as close as receiver
and as far as messages unread
until those needles insist.
No trace of what we miss
but curiosity hungers.

Memory always begins with numbers.
Easiest recollection of resentment.
Most conventional resignation of will.
Of power.
Sense of self
showered with stabs and stings.
Fleeting things
like months and milestones
thrown into the score
much like the metal love bore into us.

No closer to the core
but thrust against flesh and bone.
More prone when alone
or staring at the phone
finding home in each
internal wince
served to every
outward longing glimpse
of a time
equal parts perplexing and vexing.

The former for what was.
The latter is what it is.

What is
may be our biggest effort
toward denial
as if our wiles
and wearisome respective
displays of will
could ever keep away
what pokes and prods from deep inside.
Pride is pathetic
when used selectively in any case
and it certainly won't erase
silent screams
and daydreams...

...streams of thought
never shared
but dared to ponder
daily.
Often.
Off when preoccupied or sharing time
but our favorite crime to commit
and get away with
when it looks to fill in emotional vacancies.
Well drawn to that sense
of illicit vagrancy
with a sheet to peek over...

Weak shoulders
the bleak holders
of some sense of strength
fictionalized
to devise a way
to make this abrupt
sway in the other's direction
less dereliction
and more deliberate.
Funny to fancy one
more considerate
of a moving target in cross hairs
than one's emotional welfare

and right there is where the sharp is plunged deep.
Sleep a casualty of coarse,
calloused,
calcified collections
of former feelings and interactions
where passion still stands tall
in our perversions.
The assertion
that such intense attraction ever wavers
is our cherished lie

but to say goodbye
while justifiably warranted
is as frightening
as the pain felt in that first prick.

Nicks

The evidence of voluntary sticks
and seldom seen
but lazily concealed incisions
commissioned in bouts of secrecy
we accept as therapeutic
but we knew better of it.
Perhaps we thought lesser of it
than we allowed ourselves to believe.
Maybe the perceived harshness
was valued as catharsis.
Supposedly
the pain
came more from the underlying strain
of wanting to pierce and drain;
hoping to eventually tame
what should be removed instead

but if the dread be embraced
to the extent of extreme,
the bed strewn with threads
solid,
sharp
and pristine
that breaks away at our
contradictory convictions
will make our astriction
the closest we've come
to means we could never explain.

Love lost still holds value in pain.

Written By: Devin Joseph Metz