Ten Showers

It’s a ten showers day
though you are not visibly
more unclean
today;  some days
you take ten showers,
though ten showers
are not enough on those days
when you cannot forget
you were born
into your family,
and your family was
a stewpot of blood.

Take a hundred showers, take a thousand,
spend all day under the stream
or in the steam, it won’t be enough.
Even when you sleep you sleep dirty
remembering the reddened people,
their hands upon you, sick satisfaction
and ogrish comfort you took there
in the midst of soil and stink.  

No,
neither ten
nor one hundred
nor ten thousand
showers shall be enough.

Better off, now, to do one of two things:
drown yourself
getting fantastically
and falsely clean,

or move on.  Admit
to the blood in your teeth and
the clots under your nails.
Admit that it feels good
to have survived.   You must have done it right
and there’s no need
to hide it and never go back
to the stewpot again,

no matter how strongly the blood-stink pulls you
because it is bitter and iron-rich
and smells unforgettably like home.