Some children are born
With tragedy in their blood
Their fragile bones
Pressed to hardness from the dust,
The ruins of past lives
The overlap of muscle and skin
Layers of vicissitudes
Skin, an intricate weave of cells and afflictions
Their beating hearts
Already broken.
These quiet moments are my favorite;
A steaming mug of coffee
To fight against the chill in the air
Your sleepy sounds in the next room
While I read by the morning sunrise
There is nothing I want more
Than to steal these moments every day
To keep them sacred for myself
To know that you are safe.
I tend to taste my words,
Rolling them around my mouth like loose teeth
The bitterness of blood from biting my tongue
On words too angry, too honest
Filling my mouth with venom I’d sooner choke on than spit,
Slowly poisoning myself with every swallow.
I was always a wallflower,
But I make a pretty good wallpaper too
Back against the wall for so long I’ve become the landscape
Spreading myself thin to seal every crack
Blocking off my only exits
Sealing off the oxygen
Suffocating myself within my self-created prison
Trying to break free feels like losing parts of me
Leaving behind skin and blood
To stain the rocks I crashed myself against
Forever remembering the mountain on my back,
The weight of the world crushing as I stumble,
I’ve forgotten how to stand on my own feet
But I think I’ll spend the next while crawling
Hands and knees, slither like a snake
Seeing what’s below the surface of everything
The new perspective is working for me
I grew up in novellas and thick tomes,
Seeing sunlight filtered through dust particles dancing in the air,
Springing from the pages that held my very essence.
I was well-traveled through countries and eras
Through countryside with wildflower-air
And the musty scents of a busy city,
Accustomed to all sorts of gentlemen and ladies.
I don’t consider myself a romantic;
Fancy of whims belongs to ink and paper,
And I am much too grown up for such trivial things as love.
It was never something solid,
Never tangible unless I held the book containing it in my hands.
Love was just a pretty word used by desperate people.
But I thought of love then
As I pressed carnation petals between the pages of a Jane Austin book,
Or hid roses in the folds of Oscar Wilde.
I dreamt of love as I read of things I’d never truly understood,
Like an actor reading lines of Shakespeare without comprehension,
Love fell short of its mark.
I don’t consider myself a romantic
I consider myself tragic,
A quality which spills like an over full cup of tea,
Staining itself onto the pages of my books.
I speak of myself through poetry and prose,
But never in a way that can candidly be made sense of.
My love has never been a person,
But personified in the ideas I fill my pretty head with,
Making ladies swoon and gentlemen shake with passionate fury.
My love is in my elegance,
My eloquence,
And my erudition,
Of which I owe all to the words of dead poets.
Being tragic I prefer being woefully misunderstood,
Kept as mysterious as the death of Edgar Poe
And maintaining an air of troubled youth.
I stare at these crumbling castle walls
The once-mighty stronghold of my heart
Turned to ash and rubble in the wake of my own inevitability
My hatred of myself has torn the stones from their places,
Has felled each turret and hall.
I wander amongst the wreckage
The endless madness of my mind
These ancient ruins, a maze of my own invention
Designed to keep the darkness inside me from escaping
Lost inside my blackened eyes.
I find no solace within this prison
The forgotten fortress of my soul
The church bell tolls its mournful notes for the dead
The blight of my existence resides within this decaying citadel
It has become my final tomb.
I was never interested in cartography
Until I met you
Now I long to map the planes of your shoulders,
The breadth of you back,
The mountain range of your spine.
I wish to plot points on your skin
Like a map,
Showing all the places I have yet to explore,
Strung together with veins of red threads
The destinations of my crimes of passion.
You’re so used to my silence,
To my bearing your burdens quietly
It makes you feel better
To know I won’t complain,
That I’ll weather any storm you create
And still stand ready for more.
But today
I was not silent.
Although I never raised my voice
It sounded like thunder to my own ears,
Deafening in its purpose,
In its simplicity:
Enough.
My back is broken,
My wood boards wrenched apart and sails
Tattered and torn
From years of gales and lightning.
High winds of anger
Blown in your breath as you spit hurt like rain
Enough to drown me
But never enough to wash away the words
Already said.
Although rotten inside
From years of salt water tears,
I stand as tall as the mast
Upon which my white-flag rags once hung
An unspoken plea:
Surrender.
Does my strength surprise you?
Your forceful nature made me such,
Hardened like a lonely captain
Commanding a damned vessel
To her inevitable death.
It’s an odd thing –
Being so young and yet feeling like my life is already over
I haven’t had enough experience to be able to say
“I have lived”
But time has already begun to fade,
Days and weeks blur together and I cling to routine
Even as I fight against my own complacency.
Being young and lifeless makes it hard for planting dreams,
Like seeds on concrete they wither in the light of every new day.
Why continue planting when the soil is the same?
I watch those around me grow and drift away
But I feel rooted,
Unintentionally.
I’ve never wanted to stay in one place and yet I find myself unable to move.
I strain against the comfort of normalcy,
The very thought of settling down setting my skin to crawling
Because there’s so much I want to do,
And so little time in which to do it.
Am I 19 or 93?
Sometimes I forget how short my time has been,
Too focused on changing, on growing
That I send my consciousness to the stratosphere
Where it lingers for minutes
Or maybe for centuries.
It still surprises me that after all this time
Living with myself is hard.
The ticks and bad habits I thought I had broken
Somehow find their way to the surface
Spinning me out of control in my attempts at consoling myself
Like a drug addict refusing rehab,
I continue wading through the traumas of my past alone,
Muddy waters seeping in to soak my shoes
Until everything is dark and stained.
Most days I feel more victim than survivor
Lying to them and myself when they ask how I’m doing
Because I’m stuck in the same place I used to be,
Even though I’m trying my best not to be
But how do you explain to a healthy person
What choking on your illness every time you breathe feels like?
How can I tell you that sometimes I choose to be sick,
Falling back on old familiar ways for comfort
Even as they kill me.
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