I thought maybe, just maybe
If I cut deep enough I could reach my insides
Because that's where the hurt was,
Deep inside, beneath a layer of skin and flesh.

If I just broke through it,
Maybe it would leak out of me,
An overflow and ooze of pain and hate.

I knew my blood would be black, it had to be,
Since that's what I was filled with- darkness.
The amount wasn't surprising,
It was beautiful.
Each stream released a different pain bottled inside of me,
Like a delicate river in the black of night.

What did surprise me though, was its sticky substance.
But without much thought, the obvious reason came to me-
It was my sickness.
Everyone knows sickness is sticky.
And since my body was all sickness,
It too would run in my blood.

So it was the sticky blackness that kept me going.
It became my reward,
It was empirical evidence that I was getting better.
I had to be, I was losing so much sticky darkness.
There was no plausible way the outcome was reversed.

It wasn't till later that I realized,
If my darkness and sickness was so consuming,
And it was my blood-
Then it was keeping me alive.

The more I drew, the less I lived.
I was not getting better,
I was getting closer to death.

How could I be getting better,
If what I desired most was
a cut of flesh,
a pool of black,
a sticky mess,
a one-way ticket.