Skin Cells

I can feel them pull me down,

Dragging at my skin with their dead weight;

A thousand tiny corpses smothering my living flesh.

I scrape at them, pull them with my fingernails, scrub my skin ‘til it’s raw,

Anything to eradicate the little beasts.

 

They raise their ghostly heads in tearful supplication,

Screaming, pleading that I let them stay.

“We were part of you,” they cry, “Remember how you loved us”

But I feel no remorse.

I am a cruel, merciless tyrant, killing the old to save the new.

 

It’s an animal act of self preservation,

Ruthlessly attacking them with unfeeling soap and water.

I feel them there, crawling like ants,

A sign that I’m slowly dying,

And entropy will eventually defeat me.

 

I fear that some day I’ll be too tired,

 Stop scrubbing and pulling and skinning myself alive,

And be suffocated by the dead cells I’m too weak to remove,

They’ll all come back to haunt me, fly up from the drains I washed them down,

And my past will finally consume my present.

 

But for now, I am just strong enough to defeat them.

I step out of the shower, pink and triumphant,

Look at my skin, shiny and new.

But I know it’s only a matter of time,

Before this too must be torn away and forgotten.

 

 

 

Reviews

[indu]

fascinating.
perhaps if each cells could talk, they might say a 100 complaints.

[Antonio Valentino]

Hands down one of the best things I've read in quite a while. Very anxious to read more of you. The style of this was fascinating.

Antonio

[Steve]

Well written....

[Kristopher]

The past is always nagging... always ragging on our minds...
but must it be washed away so callously?

[Coyote Poetry]

The poem is very good. I like the movie about the man who lived in a house. Allow no bugs or bad things in. The poem reminded me of this story. A hot showers allow us to feel clean and refresh. If we could see the things on our body we would be very unhappy. I like the ending. A true ending to a excellent poem.
Coyote

[silver threaded queen]

love it! it gave me a feeling something was crawling all over me. how torturing the mind can be.

[marisa starkilicious]

This was very intense, drew me right it. You used imagery to its best. And it had a very humorous tone to it, which made me chuckle at the last lines. I love it when such a serious poem is used to describe a rather simple act.

Wonderful job with this. Must add to library now..

[Zeitgeist Manifesto]

Wow. This was uber-intense. It made my ski-...
It gave me goose bum-.... It ..
It...
It gave me a chill. You captured the anxiety
with such a frantic but calculated nature.
I really enjoyed it.

[Nianque]

Love the imagery. "Fly up from the drains I washed them down" That was my favorite line along with "And my past will finally consume my present."

Beautiful imagination :)