“Put it out there.” she said,
that first therapist, the one who saw you
at your blackest, every sin and flaw
laid out to this perfect stranger in some blind faith,
or more truthfully,
in your desperate need for confession.

You learned the hard way the corrosion
of pretending perfection. It’s corrosion
on you and all you touched. But the whole idea
of peeling the layers off, one by one, in public,
when you could barely admit your boils and brokenness yourself
seemed a whole new kind of madness
before you had cured the first kind.

“Put it out there.” she said.
“You are a creature of discipline,
and you feel a responsibility, even if only one or two reads
to continue writing.
The bloodletting will be your cure
and to do it in the market square
will help your healing. Trust me.”

I didn’t of course. Trust that is.
I was far from a place where I could trust anyone,
but too, I was desperate,
and so I began that slow strip tease
I continue today,

unwrapping layer after layer where anyone can watch,
never knowing where to stop exactly,
when enough is enough and when perhaps
I have moved to something too close to the flesh
where I will burn for my perfidy of truth telling
and when I do not strip enough away that no one cares.
It’s a strange game, poetry as therapy,
poetry as strip teases, but who knew,
fifteen years later,
that there were still layers left