I strip you bare before the world.
I lay all your secrets
bare in my poems.
I strip you bare
as though peeling
my own skin from myself.
I undress you
and I am not afraid
of your nakedness
in my poems.
I am afraid
of the silences
in which you would remain
unspoken, unrevealed.
I take you apart, word by word,
into sighs
between the lines,
into all the things you never said,
yet lived on
in your glances.
You are in my verses;
there is nowhere left
for you to hide.
You stand stripped bare
from your very first thought
to your very last.
And if, by chance,
that truth should hurt you,
laid bare before the world,
inscribed in verses
within my poems,
remember:
before I could strip you bare,
I had to strip
myself bare first.
