(I've been struggling to show anyone this poem for a long time but I've been inspired to let it free. These feelings are behind me now and it turns out writing was to thank for that afterall)

 

How does someone stop cutting?
Do they cut into the paper instead?
Replace flesh and blood with diaries and ink,
Replace physicality with mentality,
Replace actions with words,

It isn’t enough.

How does someone stop hurting?
Are they supposed to write ameliorative words?
Watch sunsets, smile and taste candy-like diction?
See through a stain glass window?
Live behind a picketed fence?

Sometimes I carve my own fences into my body,
On to my hands so that they and only they may hold the key.
I can draw a cure, I can say healing words,
I can erase pain on paper,
It’s not so easy to transfer such things into how I feel.

I can craft red ribbons, I can wear them wound around my wrists
But it’s not the same.
I can let knives roll off my tongue to hit the image of myself
But there’s no attachment,
I can paint blood on the walls, pray to God and hope for a miracle,

I can let shards of lead exude from my pencil tip,
And on to the target labelled ‘poem’
But I am numb in doing so.
Express, art, release
These are ‘other’ methods, ‘better’ methods...

But who’s to say they’re ‘better’ if I don’t feel any release.
At least the first method released a part of me, the anatomical part; my haemoglobin
And if you release something which constructed you to see it reform itself
It makes you feel a lot stronger than lifting a finger to construct something entirely on your own
Which will never breathe life, never live, never become an action

And ‘actions speak louder than words’.

....Who would help someone who only mentally self harmed after all?