Self-harm exists on a spectrum. The mildest, most invisible to the outside, the one that hurts so much on the inside, is that I bury my feelings.

succulents stripping in my skin

Hardly anyone can tell when I need to cry. I don’t realise it, too, I just stand beside myself and watch my smile as if it were one.

parentification
echoes of an echo
come back

I believe that when you grow up in love but it’s not the one you need, you learn to throw it against the wall under a different name, like shadows.

sleepwalkers an intimate cup of poet’s jasmine

One day you turn around to the sun and weep in horror, because it’s bright, it’s big, shifting the shadows to become real. The ground disappears into them.

a late evening sun,
we mark the foothills
in the dust

Again I can’t cry. It is a new day. I carry guilt and shame, unclear if they are really mine.

semicolon tattoo
making myself
sigh

When I seek expression for the turmoil within me, I crank up the volume, let the singers scream for me. That’s better than being completely silent.

death growl petals enter the ether

But I don’t know what real silence is. So often something inside needs sorting, nurturing, is wild, wants everything everywhere all at once.

spring tide the headlines after Ophelia

I think we have art to keep us alive.

sunset meadow
it is as if there were
a thousandfold of bars*

I feel like I need to apologise, but I don’t want to. No-one’s eager to see this. But it’s human to get lost. To be found. To struggle with oneself.

microscoping class
the world composed
in breakdown

Self-harm is a state, it begins, it ends. Turn the pain inside out like a sock. An illusion: to think we’re at any given time the same person.

the realm of and
i’ve held a snowflake

Someone thought they should comfort me by saying the wounds will surely disappear. I look at the old scars on my arm and think: they’ve never bothered me,

but the humans
do unkind things…
reading from the prophecy

My consolation now is to see my scars. I read in their existence like I read poems, and write some, and the most important of them are like socks, too.

I study Joseph Wright’s play of light for a long while
if I just had a final say in it, and I have

Kati Mohr

…………………..

*Excerpt of “Der Panther”, Rainer Maria Rilke. Translation by Kati Mohr.