Pressure

by Sarah Jane Souther

The pressure of a thought

Before expression

A subtle communication

Hidden until explosion

A moment swollen

Like a breath

Before a scream

Sometimes I dream

of breaking

Just splitting

Some interior seam

I wonder if I’d bleed

Or is that kind of explosion

Really implosion

Am I always so

contained within myself

Do some kinds of blood,

instead of seeping

Simply circulate

Is there purpose outside

my own self-consciousness?

This question, rhetorical

I ask only to cross examine myself

Purpose found me

already

Long before I started looking for it

It visited me in the blackness of a womb

it held me,

My small fingers growing

And as they grew

curling

Around the hands of God

Did I doubt love then

Like I do now

Or in that time that precedes memory

Did I believe

That existence was a kindness

So much older now

So old and wise I tell myself

As I look at life and it’s cruelties and

Saying, ignorantly

These are the most true things

That horror and disappointment

win the daylight

And the night

And the sunrises and the dusks

And we are all going back to dust anyway

But I don’t believe this

After all

Here I am

Writing and wrenching

Hope from every embrace, every

Blade of grass in the park

Every baby smiling on the subway

Because I know

I could so easily split it all

With a razor blade

And I don’t say this to say

I wish for death

Only to acknowledge the thinness

Of life

Staring back at me

From the blue veins in my wrists

What keeps us here spinning on a sphere?

More than gravity I mean

What keep us choosing beginnings

And beginning again

Over endings

I look at God and my voice surprises me when I say 

“Where else could I go?

You have the words of life.”

I thought these words

would come from my mouth

reverently,

like a song

Instead they come strangled

A cry to the dark

As if, at this point,

I almost wish

there was a different explanation.

An easier one.

And the goodness of God

Was more like the feeling

Of a cool cloth to the forehead

Than the touch of a surgeon

Scalpel to skin

And the lancing of the wound

And the draining of the hope

That was false but felt good

And I wanted it

Anyways.

But then again

Why was I so content with blisters?