my body is a witch i am burning it

I am sad. I went to church. Music was pretty. People were so into it. I felt so guilty. I couldn't concentrate. A part of my mind is so perpetually focused on the mundane, and no matter how hard I try to look at the big picture, that stupid part usually can't be suppressed for very long. It always ends up coming back to the surface and eating away at me. I don't know what I believe in. That doesn't bother me so much. I think there are many paths to God. I just want to be a part of something bigger, and I know, innately, that I am, because we all are, but I make myself and my life so fucking small. At this point in my twisted, stressful life, as I grapple for some stupid artificial sense of control, food is my god. It runs my whole fucking life. And I recognize this. And that's the most infuriating part of all. I recognize it. I recognize that it is illogical and I acknowledge that irrationality and yet I am too fucking terrified to change. What the hell am I so fucking scared of?? Why do I only feel like a decent, semi-worthy human being when I'm putting myself through excruciating restrictive behaviors? I don't see the bones when I look in the mirror. I don't see fat, either, and getting thinner certainly isn't my goal, but I don't know what my goal is or why this method composes my comfort zone. What do I see in the mirror? What do I want to see? Nothing? Is that it? Am I just trying to fucking disappear? Total erasure of the self . . . huh. Maybe that actually makes sense.

A poem by Eavan Boland:

flesh is heretic.
my body is a witch.i am burning it.
yes i am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
they scorch in my self denials.

how she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till i renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
i vomited
her hungers.
now the bitch is burning.

i am starved and curveless.
i am skin and bone.
she has learned her lesson.
thin as a rib
i turn in sleep.
my dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.how warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
i will slip
back into him again
as if i had never been away.

caged so
i will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.