Cancer

Every morning these days,
When I wake up I see
a clump of words on my pillowcase.
I do not know when they fell out
in the night
but every morning I lose
more and more words.
When I write, they bleed
imy hands, my fingers.
I have blood on my hands.
I kill them myself.
Everytime I wrench them out
like a tweezer pulling at an indignant hair
I am pressing a razor to my wrist,
and they come out, the words
rushing, pouring.
I bleed words.
When they are inside, they are
my blood and I am them.
Outside,
they are corpses
of what was alive.
I kill.
“Them”.
And I no longer know
when the words have bled,
what “them” is.