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 Dec 2018 Marnie Hall
Ally Ann
A friend asked me
how to be a writer.
I wanted to say,
lock yourself in a room,
scream until you have
a poem and no voice.
Open your veins and bleed
until you know that your bones
are pure words and sorrow.
Act as if you slit your own throat
and all you can bleed
are your own regrets
and all of the darkness
you boxed up for inspiration.
Write your mom a letter,
tell her you're leaving
and you won't be back for awhile
Because being a writer is traveling
through all seven layers of Hell
and denying anything is wrong.
Forget loving yourself
when all you have is a pen and paper
fused to your wrist
and Jesus is tapping at your skull
saying turn back now.
Warn the neighbors that if they smell burning
It's just your soul
clawing at the front door trying to get in.
Learn how to be alone.
Learn how to lose everything you have
in order to feel release,
learn how to only feel deceased
from now on.
A friend asked me
how to be a writer.
All I said was
don't
At night,
when I close my eyes,
The Dream Workers come.

And in the morning,
when I open them,
The Dream Workers leave.

But one day,
they never left.
The end might not make sense unless you really think about the title.
I am
the child of countless
genocides
of lands suppressed, who can’t
see the brighter
side

I am
the daughter of a neglected
family
who can’t look in their eyes, for they don’t care about
me

I am
the son of a town
lost in a futile
cycle
who doesn’t know how to get out, as every path
is an imploding
spiral

I am
the result of my mother
being
forced against her wishes, to think atrocity is what bore my
living

I am
the result of my father
who
sacrificed everything, just to see my life pull
through

I am
the offspring of a
colony
whose people are considered expendable, as if we aren’t all equally
holy

I am
the result of a bloodthirsty
state
who pillaged and burned
any place we saw fit, as if we carried their
fate

I am
a taker of
lives,
just as I am a bearer of
life

I am
a being of hate and
apathy
as much as I am a person of
love and
serenity

I am
the sword and the shield,
the dark and the light
the scorned and the healed

This is my story
so much as it is yours

The children of humanity
You & I

— The End —