The Savagery Of Thought Poem by Robbie Coburn

The mirror is foreign
learning this language of the body, the ways it alters
in the throes of a deliberate brutality,

the savagery of thought, its driving influence over action,
harsh impressions left on the skin
as ash corrugates on the surface,
I climb into discolouration reveling in
the trance of pain, constructing a regressive agony,

standing before a transcendent reflection,
this language spoken in glass;
the physical dialect of my targeted body in the soft hum of blood-

harm is the cruel eye of the needle that the body threads through,
to ache is to witness being.