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Tori Schall Oct 2019
In the world of a girl, me,
there is always a story
waiting between the pages of life.

In every word, in every scene,
I catalog and dissect the meaning
of everyone and everything.
Like some sort of word scientist.

But life isn't always sunshine and rainbows,
sometimes it storms, and there is only grey.
I quite prefer the rain to the rainbow.

But I am not like everyone else,
who gossip about boys and sports
whilst putting on a pound of makeup in the morning.
I am...different.

And in this world, the difference is frowned upon.
So what if I dye my hair odd colors?
So what if I'm a girl with hair short like a boys?
That doesn't make me anything less.
I am more than they could ever imagine.

Just because I sit outside in the rain
or eat my lunch alone, headphones injecting lyrics into my skull
that only I can understand the meaning of
because my brain is my own, not anyone else.

And I don't care that I prefer the company of fake people on screens,
just so I can escape my miserable existence in the real world.
I don't care that I fight every single day just to make it through
and then realize I have to do it all again in the morning.

I don't care. Because I stopped caring a long time ago.
I stopped caring when my own brain decided to rob me
of everything I held dear and turned everyone against me.
I'm just a story in my own head, playing out like a badly written movie.
But that's okay.
Because I wouldn't mind it if I was just a story among millions.
That still means that somewhere,
someone is reading it.
I know it's long, I've seen longer
Tori Schall Oct 2019
In my life there are three things:
A feeling of emptiness,
a hollow laugh and blank face,
Hiding behind a mask

I wonder day by day
nothing changing
the world around me is unimportant.
In my life there are three things:

My own emotions elude me
they go about their days
hiding in the back of my brain
a feeling of emptiness

Upon my face there sits
a person I don't know
Because of all I ever am is
a hollow laugh and blank face

Day by day, night by night
nobody ever bothers to look
but I never bother to tell, I'm
hiding behind a mask
This is my first attempt at a cascade poem
Tori Schall Oct 2019
Save your tears for someone
who can comfort you as they fall.
Don't waste them on someone
who can't even cry for themselves.

Save your laughter for someone
who can laugh along with you.
Don't waste it on someone
who's forgotten how.

Save your bright smile for someone
who will appreciate the gesture
Don't waste it on someone
who's smile is never true

I'll give you a single piece of advice, my dear:
It would be a mistake to fall for someone
who cannot fall for you.
Tori Schall Oct 2019
Don't forget your promise to the stars.
Don't let all the misery, tear you apart.
Don't let your heart blow away in the wind.
Don't let my memory go out like a spark.

But if you do tonight.
I'll just close my eyes.
So I don't have to see,
when everything I love
Is set free.
Tori Schall Oct 2019
I would take the world in the palm of my hand
and crush it.
I would take the weight of the world,
and my legs would not give.

I would say goodbye to the sun
and live in darkness.
I would say hello to my head
and all the horrors within it.

I would let you fall away
if only I could bear it.
I would let my mind rest
if only I knew how to stop it.
  Oct 2019 Tori Schall
Colm
The rain unsettling shakes more than me
It shakes the summer out of the pensive trees
The quiet out of the evening still
The confidence out of the newfound skill
And more so than the colored leaves
Which newly rest on dampened ground
As the sorting of the rain gives way
Resulting in a plethora of familiar sounds
All merging beneath and moving fast
Like a symphony of cicadas in the summers past
Known only to one in time as the same  
As the parting whisper of the trees in rain
Written on a whim tonight, when I first heard the rain greet the evening trees and their fading leaves. True story, the idea behind this is that the trees part ways with their leaves, just as we human beings will one day have to part ways with our children. Slowly, steadily and with a whisper.

Hi SVK!
  Oct 2019 Tori Schall
Traci Sims
"Love is nothing but a biological transaction," you yelled at me and we fought anew over the perfidies of the male ***.
Initially dismayed, I soon understood that
As a girl, you saw your father break your mother,
Her will over the years fusing with his own
As she became shadow,
And then sickly ghost,
Her lucky marriage effectively erasing the stain of her Jewish birth--
As oh so Catholic Daddy
proudly told his friends and relatives.
And even though you tried to fight Daddy's self-importance,
He was always there behind you, squeezing you between his fists,
molding you, as he imitated his god creating Eve,
Casting you into his own perfect image of chaste and chastened womanhood.
And when your mother decided to permanently leave,
Daddy forbade you to miss her,
Celebrating, instead, his own resurrection with a new project and a new wife.
Twice.
You thought you could resist,
But Daddy's benevolent advice
about your plain face and lumpy body wormed into your fragile psyche and
cracked you in two, leaving you raving and disjointed.
Daddy eventually joined his sky-Father
And you wept, vowing to forget and remember his legacy.
And now you live, addled and alone,
A basket of pills on your dresser,
Fanatically frustrated yet terrified of a man's  touch,
Angry yet wishing Daddy was here to save you.
And as the years passed and your friends married and divorced, you
convinced yourself that you had
escaped a woman's fate , not
realizing that you had offered up your own heart and soul  years ago as a suitable offering to His eternal memory.

Yes, Daddy made ****** sure there would be no following act.
This is the story of a real person. Everything I wrote about her father is something she told me actually happened to her and her family. It is a modern American horror story.
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