For so long I've wonder what it would feel like to be stabbed
To feel the knife in my back as I fall slow

For so long I've long to be normal and to know how others feel
I just wanted to be okay

For so long I wanted to stop crying or lashing out because that's not okay

My mom told me it's not okay

You see my mom didn't understand that when I come home and go straight to my room

I'm not okay!

But when she did that wasn't okay.
I was crazy and defected
That's how she saw me
That's how I saw me

For so long to her I was a shadow unless she needed to vent
You see we weren't related we were friends
At Least that's what we pretended to be

So for so long I didn't understand love
But when I did I didn't get enough

Maybe that's because I wasn't enough?

I didn't understand that people care for no reason
That when someone says I love you it wasn't because they had to
I didn't understand that people could just be happy hearing just a name

But when I did
When I did
I was scared

Who could love me
Who would love me
I was broken

I am broken

So I hurt people
I was my mom for so long because who else could I be
I couldn't be me
She didn't want me to be

So I became her
I was just a dream
Someone  made up

At least that was till I was real
But no one knows
No one knows

I want be me again
I miss her so much
She misses me too
At least I think so

She doesn't answer anymore
She just stares and lays there
Or she just cries

But when the drugs hit she is alive
She is here
She is happy
She is free
But when they run out I'm back to me
Who is me
Who is me
Who is me
Who am I

I want to die

It was a graveyard and overcast sky
and I sat with book and accordian in hand,
hearing the world with its screams
swallow up around me.
The people whom I had loved and lost,
Papa with his silver eyes
Mama her sharp tongue and tough love
Rudy whose hair the colour of lemons
and questioned why, the living and dead,
worlds apart, yet both did not have a choice.
I stood and screamed so that everything shook
the burning rubble and ash and dust
willing my words to bring it all back
but it did not come, and my breath rose in gasps.
Death had looked me in the eye and said,
“It’s not time yet.”
I would shut my eyes to the world
only decades later.
I will understand that there was hate and pain
there was sadness
but even more so, there was love and joy.
I will know that the people I loved had reason
to kiss goodbye
whether it was their own hurt
or saw it as a necessity,
but they were never truly gone from me
always somewhere nearby,
in the thick and thin
frail and worn
of times.
I would learn
to forgive Death that day.
I will understand that
and I will be hurt,
but I will be okay.

~

Not all deaths are sad.
Some, meant to ease their own pain,
Are called freedom.
While some,
Meant to ease the pain of others,
Are called love.

© BT

there is
a           mess
about her,

fluttering
towards  open

    space.


writhing

below pale
skin,

refusing to sit

so structurally,
so secured

in flesh.


wildly
           bending
and      swelling,


becoming

the
           savage


she so calmly
swears

isn’t there.











*-MJS