Skin Prayer

My God, beneath my quiet face all is
a formless emptiness. The darkened horde
of pulsions cast upon the deep like mist
irrupt the Spirit’s generative word
and boil in my skin. My cyclic search
for their expression drives me to this mirror
to force with practiced fingernails the purge
of turbulent infection from the pores.
What language fails to speak I score in scars
of living hieroglyphs, their bloodless flush
to bear, with the slow burn of aging stars,
a witness of resistance to the crush
of void: a testament of genesis
which, lacking word, must cry to You in flesh.