I imagine you calm,
A sentient being.
The world to which you bow to unfolding before your eyes, a kind of rapturing. Finally unwinding to reveal the truth it has always held: you are tired and the rain seems to never stop long enough to let you empty,
It pours,
Endlessly. Leaving streams into which you drown.
It perches atop your shoulders, this tiredness, chirping songs not of succor, not of hope but a call to your final moments. A ministration.
To a resting place you do not know.

Please do not answer.

I wrote you a love note
It said too much of me,
I set it aflame.

-- when I have the tenderness of a writhing dragon,
he will paint flowers across my throat

as though to remind me that fires are indelicate,
and that I writhe in a prison made of open space.
-- this man will not smother me with his skin
when we sleep.
-- this man will unhinge the door of my mouth,
and kiss out the bullets stuck under my tongue.
                                                                ­               ---
whatever thousandth day I awaken beside this man,
realizing I have become the flowers he painted
across my throat, by braving my throat,

I will, unchaining myself from the draconic worry,
bring him his coffee in bed, with a smile.

There is an ever growing forest within my chest, viridescent canopies endlessly reaching towards powder blue skies like hands extended upwards in prayer
Vividly mesmerizing flowers of imagination and life bloom in scattered unmarked paths for meandering souls
Sadness flows in endless fountains pouring forth rapidly rushing streams of velvet indigo and starlight
Crumbling riverbanks signal the beginnings of tentative doubts
I’ve become aware of the weight of heavy shackles curling around my wrists like thick vines and ivy twisting over old bricks
Nature reclaiming my insides, society disdaining and threatening to capture and drag me beneath the underbrush
I feel the unmistakable pang of hopelessness nesting its thorns just below my ribcage, etching itself into my skin like stonemasons carving their legacy into mountain faces
My body is sacred ground, a temple of an apathetic deity who’s staked ownership over the emotions that run deep like ocean currents in my veins
My heart pumps opalescent despair, washing up on the shores like waves on new sands of lands I’ve yet to see
My forest lays on an island within the bermuda triangle, unreachable by sea or sky
My emotions act as geomagnetic pulses and methane vents to  confuse your aeronautical and sea faring instruments,  causing your vessels to come crashing down and sinking into the vast expanse of rolling royal blue unknown
I exist for the sole purpose of straining inspiration and failing aspirations
Those inky black buds slowly unfurling in the core of my being, remnants giving way to wilting foliage, petals listless at my feet, eroding with the will of misery and time with vibrant colors burning to ashen corpses
With my lips I inspire hope, yet my own lack thereof hollows me out like rotting jack o lanterns
with light flickering despondently through gaping hole, my eyes, liquid light vaguely sauntering downwards, softly dripping into my hopeful reserves like torrential rain
Drumming like the thrumming of my rushing blood in my ears and the powerful thunder of waterfalls cascading in the distance, returning to earth from their perpetual perch atop towering mountains
A jungle of my own endless shame carves me like a sculpture, eroding me like oceans and cliff faces over thousands of years, with fear uncoiling like deep blue carpets of jagged glass running like rivers, squeezes the paralyzing uncertainty into my blood like an injection. Turmoil joins self loathing, they loom above like my own personal berlin wall, disappearing into the white clouds composed of nervousness and doubt, separation from all I long to aspire to on the other side

Outwardly I am a titanium barrier, inwardly, a net of strings hold me together within confining my true self to my mind. The metaphoric needle posed between thumb and forefinger, sewing patch after patch across my ruined skin, holding in the things that threaten to burst. The thread is my self value, thin and dissolving.
Watching in the shattering mirror, who I am, as tears and blood slip past trembling fingers.  Reaching upwards towards light, but I drown in the darkness. I am swallowed by hopeless misery.
Floundering and toiling in the shadows of my own faith and nearly forgotten beliefs.
Sorrow floods me, consuming in a cold fire that doesn’t burn, but freezes to the core.
Refracting shards of light that escape like a song. They fall like a melody from my lips.
While the heat of the world swirls around me in shades of blue and black. I am bruised and ask "why do I hate myself?"
I never have an answer. Only the memories of a life so beyond dysfunctional that I have to resort to story writing to make believe a happy ending, never truly believing in it.

What were these whispered words that squirmed and infiltrated my mind, what are those lost secrets and memories left to fade away. Tormented, still I remain silent. Suffering quietly. Wondering if I'll go down without a fight, or would I take my own life. It is the loss of my humanity. I transcend in definition, no longer resembling who I was.  Silver tears, dripping from the eyes of the moon, as if such a cold distant satellite mourns for and with me.

Fear remains, as it always does, clutching my heart in an iron grasp. Despite the freedom of a new life, my knees are buckling, I’m poised to run, as if there were a place to escape to. Walls arise on all sides. I am locked in a box, where I hide away from the world, and I become, cold and distant as the moon. Fighting myself endlessly.
Hide everything I am from the world, and put it out of sight of myself, I don't dare to confront it.
I ask myself again. "Why do I hate?" I know a vague answer to it this time. I have allowed the evil and cruelty of a despondent life before this one to shape me, even after my resurrection, despite my belief and faith. I had let it consume me.
My heart, a thousand splinters of ice, would once break, even if it was looked at, or touched, cracked and shatter repeatedly. I only watch, making no attempt to heal myself. Content with viewing my own nails clashing with soft flesh that gives way to pain and agony. Slicing into cold abysmal depths, bleeding a metaphoric spectrum of ****** colors into my veins that then spill down the drain of my heart.

I wonder if there is any capacity within me, for the remnants of a shimmering soul to return to hope?   I'd abandoned love and hope for so long, had they dissipated completely. Do I dare to uncover such a startling miserable revelation?
My voice catches in my chest, as I sing halfheartedly for my freedom. To be released from my anguish. My voice not carrying past my lips, stolen by the wind of despair circulating around me.
I had changed, believed myself worthless and ugly. Melancholy, a kaleidoscope of emotions contrasting with one another. Dripping together to create the painting of my life. Magnificent, yet lonely and sad. Like forlorn splatter-paint tears down the side of eroding walls.

I was told once that I was shiny on the outside, and dull on the inside. Gilded. I want to change that. I cannot hide the scars I have been dealt, nor can I conceal the ones I've inflicted to my own body. I remember each slice to the skin with shame. That I had knowingly marred perfect flesh.
"What value could I possibly have if I'm constantly looked down upon?"  I pose questions like this to myself.
Everything they say makes me feel worthless, like I'm not supposed to be here.
Maybe I'm not, I wasn’t supposed to live was I?
“Worthless. Freak. Stupid.”
Do these words define me?
Are they who I am?
I am a shadow, As I sink into the depths of my own insignificance I stare speculatively, emptily up at the opalescent translucence far above me. I’ve always been worthless,  but now I am nameless. I’ve never been to solid in my own emotions, right now I don’t know what to feel anymore. Where and what is joy? What happened to the light?
I dissolve into toxicity and an almost chemical stasis of depression, seeping into my heart with the thickness of sick black tar, dragging me farther than I’ve ever been beneath the surface.

I become nothing, for that is what I presume I always was, nothing. Only a mirage burning holes into the fabric of lonely hearts longing, a haunting memory left to torment into seclusion and sorrow.
An empty shell of what once was a girl with dreams, is all that remains to decay in the dark. While the shudder of sobs dies down into a tempest of self loathing.
An incandescent nightmare, flares out like the petals of a blossoming flower, they unfurl and cover the dystopia of eloquently disfigured words that curl and uncoil, only to surround the wounds of me that pour from a inky black liquid that has replaced the blood in my veins.
The push and pull of the sorrow and hope mixing into the discordant symphony of life. The sound that is the melody of me.

Narrow minds plague our streets
Ignorant views and empty arguments
Hearts filled with hatred for no reason

Are we not a country that fought for equality
Has the long walk of freedom not been walked for us
Did I misunderstand the meaning of Ubuntu

What happened to love, peace and empathy
The simplicity of an act of kindness
Has fear swept all your morals away?

They bleed when they are cut
They cry when they are sad
We breath the same air
Laugh at the same jokes
and even dream the same dreams

We are the same
It's not even about colour
How is their black different to yours?
brother hating brother
They too are Africa

Soften your blows
Try on their shoes
Its hurting them
and it will hurt you too