I am heavy
with hurt.
Both mines, and yours

And the hurt of
My mother,
a woman who deserves commited love.
And my father,
a boy who shouldn't have starved.
And my grandmothers,
girls that grew up too fast and too far away from home.

And the for all the children of the world,
all of us whose ability to love others and ourselves in a silly, gentle, erratic, genuine, inperfect, beautiful way was lost with boxed up toys and discarded sugary cereal boxes.

And for the world,
a once beautiful place that has been forced to endure careless brutality and abuse that is now scarred and broken and yet is still fighting for itself.

Like all the children of the world
Like my grandmothers
Like my father
Like my mother
Like you
Like me.

It's a heavy load to carry,
But I'm not planning to give in any time soon.

when I die
I will decompose
and be made
into something alive

I am living
made out of
decomposed bits
of dead things.

is anything ever really dead?
is anything ever really alive?

I don't know.

but my heart beats
and the earth breathes
just the same.

Her
Her
Her
Her

You want to see her in a pretty dress
That restricts the ribs, the lungs
Like my makeshift chest binder from years back

Her in a sparkly tiara
That weighs down the head
And makes me look
down
         down

Down at her shoes
High-heeled and floral
In which I stumble

In her father-daughter dance
Where he smiles bright
At his brilliant, beautiful-

Her blowing out the candles
Wishing for
...

I've only ever wished to rid of her,
And now here I am hidden behind these candles
In this dance,
Shoes,
Tiara,
Dress,
Body,

Her.

I would cry over spilled milk
But not spilled blood.

Because, the spilled milk is actively disrupting my linear and strictly constructed plan to make cereal and therefore also everything that comes after it, and I would have wasted milk and so prevented a future me from the cereal breakfast pleasure.

But, if the blood is my own, I can usually disconnect myself from the injury and just not notice, ignore, or press a paper against it to prevent bloodying everything and go on with my day with but a slight sensation in my finger. If its more dire, I'd disconnect just the same, but be slightly more irritated as it would now disrupt routine but still probably be fine. If not my own, then I'd really struggle to care, as I do not have much of the ability to transfer another's pain to myself via the superpower everyone seems to have called "empathy".

Me crying for spilled milk and not blood
does not make me alien.
It just makes me some sort of sick ******.

Huh.
I think I rather just be an alien.

I wish I knew how to be a person.

To you, it seems to be second nature
And yet to me, it seems like a sacred craft
To which I don't have ancestral access to
A foreign language
That'd take me a masterclass to learn
A calculated dance
Whose music I am deaf to,
While you have this mesmerizing choreography that you didn't even have to practice.

I can try to imitate,
Copy-paste your manerisms, sayings, even tone
But it's clearly ingenuine on me
and so very exhausting.

How can you do this and enjoy it?
Free flowing laughs and excited speech.
You shine, so bright and proud,
Not noticing how your light is making a shadow of me.

It's sad,
frustrating,
lonely.
Lonely to be a human
But not know how to be a person.