If only cuts wouldn't bleed so much said the knife coming 
            out a little. 

                                                            —May Swenson

 

 

A child's smallness makes her eyes large, and as she grows,

if she grows too small for the fire inside her, if she takes

 

to leather as her second skin, the music she loves gets darker,

louder, more rebellious, more quickly obsolete, more

 

the soundscape of the disaffected teen who stamps her

smoke at the door to the tattoo parlor and goes, like music, in. 

 

Welcome, says the wall of thorns and crosses and a lily

of stilettoes, shibboleths of the broken life that asks to lie

 

down in you, to be the crashed-out guest who sleeps whatever

bad decision off.  The pierced among us know the lure

 

of being seen as unseen.  A child is always hiding in plain sight. 

A mother stoops to brush a daughter's collar for the camera, 

 

and the girl turns her head away.  On her throat, a small tattoo.

And suddenly the flash that jewels the black of her eye.

 

Any wonder the sensitive among us wear the face of sleep. 

Look this way, says the voyeur of the future, and who are you

 

to refuse.  Whatever the dream you had last night, the one

you did not, could not, finish, you can carry it only so far

 

before it breaks out in a rash of iconography or angry sex.

The ache of dawn feels like an argument that goes on long

 

after the words, your skin filling up with dreams that cannot end,

and so you see them in the movies, among the other dreamers

 

in one capacious dark.  However far they sit from one another,

they project their pain onto one screen, one kid who lifts her blouse

 

for a boy with a needle, and looks at him straight on, her eyes

red and slowly closing, her navel iced to take the stud and bleed.