8:43 I looked in the mirror,
the one I learnt just now,
who showed me myself,
the one I learnt just now.
My face was an amalgamation -
a weird bog
of purple, green, and black.
A metastasizing rot.
I looked at my hands for assurance,
the skin you wrapped me in;
Instead I thought too hard
and cried.
✮
On Earth, do as the humans do.
live for one another,
(attention as mission)
and inflict pain.
paradoxical
How am I supposed to endure it all?
I begged for normalcy
but I was alone,
a body half-here and half-there.
Pain is the closest I felt to being one of them
the fluorescent bulb burning my face,
a split second thought of my dissolved lover -
a pang so hard I vomited bile.
Rosie took me to the dollhouse church
I asked her God to let me dream,
or to die,
but I was given nothing.
So I glued my eyelids open,
stared up into the roof,
and waited for an answer.
I tried for so long.
I’ll say it again,
I tried for so long.
She left after the second week,
so I crawled up in a fetal position,
the womb of the World engulfing me
a progenitor I never had.
✮
Human is predicated on the conceptual.
An impersonation of knowing,
love and hate.
I am finally hugged.
✮
Why did you send me here?
The licked salt strips the ground,
my neighbour does not smile,
and my lip bleeds when I pick at it.
The little lamb crawls out of the soil,
sees that his wool is white
and runs, runs, runs.
The lamb of acceptance -
I baa at the mirror,
and my reflection
makes a little more sense.
Acceptance is a punctured lung
in which orchids grow,
and I am barely here
but breathing is easier.
self inflicted puncture
blood red blossom atop
a precarious yet sturdy, starchy bramble
chaotic
natural
first time lovers reach assuredly
to harvest a precarious beauty
second time lovers tremble
but reach all the same
fearing the strength of their fortifications
previously punctured
the thorns of alluring natural affair
unthinking
how the bush might hurt herself
how the thorns press, impale, injure
from the outside in
but also
from the inside out
with the faintest gust
her branches graze one another
lacerate
blame it on the wind
but didn’t you say you were sturdy?
the inescapable growing pains
of a new thorns birth
even in stillness
the budding sharpness
piercing, prickling, palpating
an anxious
gluttonous act of self injury
all in the name
of beauty