The Ink Blot Test
When I was a boy,
my hands smelled of ink,
blue veins under skin like thin paper.
They called it a test—
the man with the clipboard,
his questions,
his black eyes waiting for me to answer wrong.
The girl beside me,
her breath of chalk and sugar,
pressed her finger in the stain.
The ink was sweet, he said,
and he smiled,
the way someone smiles
when they think they’ve won something.
He was the tester.
We were the tested—
his picture of her,
naked of innocence,
hung in his mind’s white frame.
Butterflies, pink and blue,
fluttered across our shame.
Love—
how it fights, bites,
claws its way up
like a cat out of drowning.
The boy I was watched them all,
their polished shoes,
their political faces,
how they called cruelty “care.”
Doctor, you called it treatment.
Your Rorschach of touch.
Your fingers reading our skin
as if it were Braille for your hunger.
You said, don’t move.
You said, breathe.
And when we cried,
you marked your notes.
The ink blot was alive,
a bat lifting off the page,
its wings dark with what we could not say.
You took points
for every quick thought,
every refusal to lie still.
And later—
the current,
the white light,
the clean forgetting.
They said it never happened.
But in dreams,
it happens again—
ink spreading across the page,
a child’s name written once,
then drowned.
dr. wilson crump rippy, psychiatrist,
tampa general hospital, aged eleven.
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