This page is going to be a doozy to replace. My original self-injury page (lost in the Great Angelfire Crash of December 2000) had si-related quotes, art, poetry, resource listings (newsletters, organizations, and books devoted to si, as well as information about magazine articles and TV shows that focused on the issue), links to websites, and a lot of other self-injury information. Replacing it is an intensive task (one, unfortunately, that has been on the bottom of my to-do pile) and that is why, several years later, this page remains a disaster area. Although I am currently focusing on other areas of my website, I guarantee that I will soon be doing my best to rebuild this page to the scale of its predecessor.

In the meanwhile, check out my self-injury quotes or have a gander at two self-injury collages I made a few years ago, when I first began finding extremely rare scraps of si information in various print media. They are here and here. Self-injury quotes, poems, and lyrics are coming soon, and will be followed by self-injury reference materials.

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.
–Pesha Gertler, “The Healing Time”

Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor’s cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.
Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.
It hurts.
Splashes on the pale gold tile,
bright red bursts like sunlight,
like exclamation points—Another Error!
I wrap a small towel around my wrist.
A small towel indicates a small error.
Soaked through
the towel’s gold is tarnished.
There is an innocent joy in the blood’s
flow that the towel and I cannot absorb.
These spurts, worth twenty dollars a pint
on the market, sense themselves unmarketable now.
Another towel wrapped tight in terror
slows everything down. On a blue velvet
love seat from which love has wandered I
sit waiting. I am an angel with an alert
backbone. I am purified from the business
of panic.
–Joyce Carol Oates, “Passing an Afternoon”

Told I talked too much
made too much noise

I took up a silent hobby—
Bleeding.
–S. Marie, “Do Not Disturb”
(Note: You can purchase her wonderful book of poems here.)

Each drop
a thought,
a memory,
a feeling,
to be excised.
–S. Marie, “Blood”

Barrier,
boundary,
between me
and the outside.

Why then
do I still
tear it open?
–S. Marie, “Skin”

My wounds
do the weeping
I cannot.
–S. Marie