What can I say?

My heart is prone to stupid heroics.

With a brush full of emotional bullshit,

I try to paint over the morose with beautiful words.

I have made an art form out of overestimating my significance in others’ lives.

I make time for the people that matter to me

and get so damn hurt when they don’t reciprocate.

Every single time.

And I never learn.

I “paint” words with my pain.

I hope no one sees through it.

Stubborn. Oversensitive. Unrealistic. Loser.

What can I say?

This is me.

Alone

In the world

I cried

To no one

Who cared

So I learned

My voice

Doesn't matter

I grew up

Quiet

And afraid

If I were disagreeable

I would be shipped off

To another family

In another country

Fear

As my breakfast

Lunch

And dinner

Made me vulnerable

To predators

At first

It was junior predators

And then

Full blown

I

Never

Said

A

Word

Until the rage built

And the cage broke

And I replaced it

With a wall

Insurmountable

By nearly all

But the pen

Being mightier

Than the sword

Penetrated

My defenses

And I was

Shattered

In a way

As a kintsugi

I would shine brighter

Than any other

But I survived

And I

By some standards

Thrived

By others

I may be

Deprived

Possibly

Even

Deranged

Definitely

Estranged

From the truth

Of who I am

Because mirrors

Cause me pain

And my favorite season

Is rain

(Yeah I know that's not a real season

and no it wasn't just a stretch for a rhyme)

I am Mee

And if you get me

I'm sorry

For the hardship

That has been

Your life

But I appreciate

Not being alone

In my strife

And I believe

In the power

Of connection

As completely

As I can be seen

Burning bridges

I guess life

Has not yet worn down

All the ridges

Maybe

Next year

Things will be smooth

I’m not very poetic

it’s probably genetic

my meter‘s so frenetic

that most Proser’s cannot get it.

Inevitably, I predisclose it

every gist to predispose it

no poetic sense controls it

so I’m better off to prose it.

I erupted from the womb

as hot lava,

but after meeting the world

I hardened

into stone.

I am the hill

who became a mountain,

formed by the convergence of

of misery

and neglect

colliding—

a tectonic shift

of a child’s happiness

turned to sorrow

because

daily letdowns

and growing up too fast

were the only scraps

collecting mold

in the back of the fridge

while hope

was found three-packages-in

to a box of Swiss Rolls

bought with newspaper money.

I am the hill

who became a mountain,

uplifted

by my mother's madness

reigning over

a fatherless

household,

and the liquid fire

of Southern Comfort

bubbling like magma

from the mouth

of that seismic slut,

of late nights

holding her head

over a toilet,

in hopes

to prevent her sulfuric geysers

from burning holes in the carpet,

and a revolving door

shaped like her worn-out cunt

making it tough to fall asleep

on school nights.

I am the hill

who became a mountain,

whose line in the sand

is a six-thousand-mile

fracture

throughout my existence

of scar tissue

crusted over scar tissue

that never healed,

and of the aftershocks

palpitating

from my heart

newly discovered

as symptomatic tremors

of self-diagnosed

anxiety and depression

proving

the probability

I'm a Hypochondriac,

and certifying

that I'm too cheap

to pay for therapy

because living poor

is the state of mind

I carried with me

and downing pills

the size of cake slices

is how I medicate.

I am a hill

who became a mountain

who emerged a Volcano

after hibernating for years.

The world made me unstable.

My vents

have split into fissures

after having

nowhere to blow off steam.

My body bulges at the center

and the ground trembles

from beneath.

Some call me a sleeping giant,

others,

a sad hill,

but Vesuvius was once a hill too

and unlike him,

I’m no city killer,

I’m a world destroyer,

and I’m now awake!

When I blow

it’ll be further reaching than Krakatau,

deadlier than Tambora,

and more devastating

than the prediction of Yellowstone.

The seas will rise

at my bidding

into an impenetrable mile-high wall

where no ark,

nor any god

will ever save you.

The ground will collapse

into the netherworld

and I will scorch the skies with hellfire

burning every naysayer

and nonbeliever remaining

under my infernal blanket.

I’ll heave pyroclasts

in every direction,

covering mankind

in fifty feet of Ash,

and watch them drown

in my disgust

for humanity

under an ocean of grey

as their fate is cemented

in an eternal suffering.

When I blow,

It'll be the new

Big Bang

and it’ll be the start of everything

while being the end of it all.

And to think

I was created,

and there’s another version

of me that could've been

a happier hill,

or a loving hill,

rarely a sad hill—

the one who lived peacefully in a world

where everybody

including himself...

...survived.

I feel misplaced,

Detached,

An evolving conundrum

Of a disjointed life.

My body is here

Whilst my soul lingers

In another place

In a time foretold

Within books of old.

I spin and gravitate,

Perpetually,

To English Moors & Castles,

Michelangelo,

Elizabethan works,

Ancient, glorious art,

And emblazoned,

Lyrical compositions

Of maestros like

Puccini, Liszt, or Chopin.

Sitting alone,

Writing prose

In the dimness

Of the night,

I long for many:

Jane Austen,

The Bard,

Emily Brontë,

Oscar Wilde,

F Scott Fitzgerald,

Or Virginia Woolf

To inhabit my soul,

Conduct my pen,

And perpetuate

Their illustrious tales.

Still, I’ll muddle

As best I can

Through the task,

Strive with every breath

To create my own

Piece of prose,

Whilst praying

My endeavors

Will echo the

Slightest remnant

Of long gone

Literary geniuses

Whom I so love.

Once upon a time someone told me I was broken.

I took that moment and encased it in a snowglobe,

a glass dome on a pedestal, figurines frozen in time.

I grew up, but the world inside the snowglobe stayed the same.

It sat on a shelf gathering dust, until one day

I dared to take it off its dusty shelf, wipe away the dust,

and shake it, until the words leapt off the ground and swirled

like asbestos snowflakes, poison. I translated them

into ink, turned their venom into tattoos

that I imprinted on notebooks instead of skin.

I outgrew the body, outgrew the snowglobe.

The notebooks were filled.

The shelves expanded to make room for new memories, new globes,

some words less poisonous than others.

But the original globe still remains,

on the highest shelf where I almost can't reach it.

It is the snowglobe from which all others are born.

My poems are innovations, and the memory

is necessity, the mother.

Some days it makes me angry, other days it makes me sad.

Sometimes I revel in it, the knowledge

that I am shattered beyond repair,

and might as well live with the pieces.

Once upon someone told me I was broken,

but I could not let it go.

So I ensnared it in glass and injected it with meaning,

shook it until I could make it make sense.

Now I am frozen inside it, watching the world move on without me,

while I remain stationary,

shaking the walls until a new word

falls into my lap

waiting to be woven

into the narrative of my pain,

and I wait alongside the words

for my chance to be released,

expressed, created, made real. I dream of taking myself off this shelf

and setting my childhood free

to find the snowglobes

I never got to see.

My name is Broken,

and I live in a snowglobe,

catching fake snowflakes on my tongue

and swallowing the stale words

until I spit out new ones.

We are all artists, the only question is, "What is your medium?"

I dance through life, juggling responsibilities and joys,

cooking dinner with grace and creativity.

I play with my son, summoning all the improvisation of an actor.

I teach kids to build with their hands and build structured minds within themselves.

A true potter shows the clay how to mold itself.

I musically click click click on my keyboard, compose symphonies of emails,

or scritch scritch in my journal, or tap on my phone, resonating with my self and others.

With thoughts and feelings, I paint my worldview in infinite color.

I weave love into my relationships, each thread a connection.

Every movement, every decision, is art, is life. "Isn't it the same for you?"

Emotion in Poetry? Poetry in Motion. Life is Art. Art is Life.

I see myself in shades of monochrome,

skin dusted ash and hair singed.

I burn with every lick of heat I have endured and in turn, bottled,

stored in the husk of artistry no one is allowed to take from me.

Every word I speak is poison,

thick with vitriol on my forked tongue that forms stories,

heretics behind an enamel cage.

My song is an epic, deep and dark.

Taunting. Haunting.

They know the person with pale skin, and kind eyes.

They do not get to know the entity that bleeds dark,

and stains eternal.

They can take my body, and they can mar my heart, but I will always avenge it.

I will ruin them, syllable by bloodied syllable.

I am the soul, after all. You cannot kill that.

Sometimes I think the bottom of me has fallen out.

I mean, I think I am never satisfied.

I have gotten to a point where I think I can love someone but then I choose to look at desserts on other plates that are pretty but will never, not really, satisfy the yearning within me.

What does it mean to be perpetually unsatisfied? 

I never thought I would be this way.

I did not think that I would let my heart/mind be put into something far less safe and sound, something that could sink me.

I still do not know if I am steering my ship in the right direction. I can tell you most certainly that the clouds look like they will bring rain and thunder but when they arrive… well that’s when the sun breaks through and shows me all the ways in which I don’t know a goddamn thing,

not one thing.

And in this… I am certain.

I avoid the mirror

I need to.

It's the only way to hide.

I can see her. Every time I look in the mirror, she's standing there beside me.

"What have you done to me?" Her eyes bore in the me, gnawing into my soul as we reflect in the glass.

I can not respond. There is nothing that could explain this.

She is me, but I am not her.

Years went by, and we seemed to be split.

One innocent and wide eye. The other bitter, panicked, and clinging onto a thread of hope.

I have become a Benedict Arnold to myself.

Ideas, words, and thoughts lost to time all for my own gain, which I never managed to earn.

Running to glory but falling to a void where I lost myself along the way.

The glass kept it all. It shows it all back to me.

It will never let me free.

I avoid the mirror

And the thoughts that scream at me when I look at it, looking for release.