Ink

I hover above you. You are so white, so clean, so pure.

But I know this isn't true. Beneath your surface you're seething, bumbling with history and a jumble of unuttered thoughts, unthought ideas, idealistic hopes - just waiting for the skin to be pricked, the bubble to be burst so you can ooze forth.

I hesitate. What will happen once I make my first scratch? What will be revealed, what festering mess of hurt and repression or joy and inanity will race from the smallest nick, unstoppable once it starts?
Will you reveal things even I don't yet know? Is that part of your trick, your show?

Ink is your lifeblood, it gives you your weapon - the pen mightier than the sword, particularly against those who wield it. You sip on it greedily, soaking it into your fibres and refusing to let it go once it spills. We can try, smearing it across you or scratching over and over until the pen passes through you, but by then it's too late - it's escaped us.

You are a mirror, your reflective surface bouncing all light, but all dark too. The light is easy enough to find, it jumps out in dazzling white for all to see. It's the dark that the scratching reveals, the shadows within. The ink we spill over you is the toxic blood that courses through our hidden veins - black, murky, staining. It's best we release it through you, rather than spilling it on loved ones, rather than keeping it in where it can do no good.

I hover above you. You are marked, sullied, impure.