Communion Poem by Brian Rihlmann

Poems about sunsets
flowers, and doves in flight,
are well and good,

but the poems
about locking yourself
in a motel room
and staying drunk
for a week after blowing it
with yet another woman,
and then spending
all your money
on hookers,
phone sex,
and strip clubs,

the ones about
having a mental breakdown,
losing your job,
and almost winding up
on the streets,
about sleepless nights
and endless grinding days
plagued by the strange obsessions
of a shattered mirror mind,
a strangled howling heart...

are like holy communion,
little slices of
dripping red madness
that nourish the afflicted,
letting them off the hook
of believing that such things
belong to them alone.

And they are the ones
that just maybe,
prevent the razor's
lengthwise passage
across pulsing veins
under pale paper skin.