I didn’t know what to create
so I settled on you.

A vanity project
for my excessive enthusiasm,
tangible proof that I could make meaning of messes.

When my progress was inadequate,
I turned my tools inward
and hacked away at myself.
Then I cut up my lovers
with the techniques they taught me
and twice their finesse.

They hated my skill.

I ruined them all with my conceit
wielding the tongue that clipped their wings.
I sewed cuts shut with my sharpest needling.
I papered over flaws with the thinnest skin.
My steadfast devotion to his happiness
divorced me from my own desires:
a dual life with conflicting dreams.

Were we artists in tandem
or mad scientists at war?
Did I make you the medium for my latest self-portrait?
Were you an experiment guided by my grandest delusion?

After the latest catastrophe in my path of ruin,
successive failures of my best intentions,
I finally declare the errors of each trial:

It was naive to believe
I could mend wounds born
long before you met me.

It was naive to believe
that gifting my own wounds
could teach you to understand me.

… but I wonder:
Did you arrive at the same conclusion about the scars you gave me?
Or was I a victim of your own vanity?