THE BOY AND THE COBRA

I didn't think I would ever
do this to myself again:
everyday, seek out with knowing fingertips
the just-healed scabs; find the corners,
rip them off.

Every day,
in a torpor of shame,
I mutilate.
Remember the story about the boy
and the cobra he kept in a terracotta pot?
Every night the boy let the snake
come to him
where he slept on a simple mat.
With precise fangs, the snake would pierce
the boy's white scalp
to drink and drink and drink
a garnet gush,
two incarnadine jugs,
a gallon of bright and rosy swill,
until the boy could barely walk,
so listless and wan was he.

My wounds are the stigmata
of my hopelessness.
Yesterday I felt the passive venom rise
into the skin and muscle of my will.
I felt the bleaching poison well and ache.
How neatly that old reptilean terror of yours
sits beside a cold-blooded indifference:
the incisors of your love are twin canulas:

they leech me of my lustre
and my strength.

© Philomena van Rijswijk