A Victim of Personality

He knows about the destruction caused by reaction:
emotional wounds, self-inflicted, a repeated torture
he brings about, trying to interrogate the self
for answers, clues to why pain blossoms inside him
like a tumor he feeds cancerous doubts. Mother says
overindulgence in anything sinks the hungry soul.
He knows how dependence forces him to seek nurture
where any milk would evaporate from the intensity
of obsessive heat, that which gives warmth verging
on combustion, exploding into poison not nutrition
with its reasonable proteins and sensible vitamins.
Mother says eating human kindness, the worst medicine.
He knows how valuable and necessary detachment can be
no one likes barnacles but everyone admires jellyfish
with its ethereal floating, graceful and protean,
alone in the ocean but very much a part of a system.
To be suctioned to another one loses his own shape.
Mother knows; otherwise she would not have divorced.