shattered hands,
          and bleeding glass
                      darkened skin,
                 an unfixable mess

                   useless thoughts,
           your misguided words
                                 breaking mentality
                          until it hurts

        dampened clothes
                               a shattered mind
                    bloodstained red
what once was white,

                                                     no it isn’t
                                   it’s not your fault
                  yes, it hurts,
you’ve been through hell.

instead of saying
do
instead of judging
help
instead of worrying
be
instead of hating
love
instead of hurting
heal
instead of taking
give
instead of crawling
FLY

I will not be the punchline.
I will not be the definition of the joke you aimlessly threw at me.
I remember in school when people would tell me that sticks and stones may break my bones but words would never hurt me.
I can't help but feel the words hurt me.
And maybe the broken bone would hurt more than the words they threw at me, but a broken bone would always heal.
But the words?
They didn't
They would stay with me until I started loving myself.
And even then, they'd always be at the back of my mind.

China doll with a porcelain white face,
How your smile is soft but fading.
Your eyes little doll, are dark and hollowed;
They speak only of a soul waning.

China doll with such dainty, fragile hands,
Why is it you stand so limply with a broken back?
I found you in the dark with hands tightly chained,
Is that how they became so bruised and so black?

China doll in your lovely yellow dress,
Your mouth was sewn shut by your owner:
She with her invisible strings became your master;
And you in your silence, her prisoner

How impeccably imperfect you are-
Your creator left a crack upon your face:

Of all the dolls she put on display,
You, China, are her special make.

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

With a broken Hallelujah,
I sang you to sleep;
And at your wake,
Eulogized the many marathons
That you ran to find yourself,
Or scurried haphazardly,
After the self that you struggled to keep.

You know I waited for you,
Up on that mountain top?
While you searched tirelessly,
Almost desperately,
For that pin drop silence,
In the midst of all the cacophony.

By: Lulwama K. Mulalu