What does desperation look like?
It looks like a top two sizes too small,
like a jumper on summer,
like a self inflicted scar.
It looks like an empty bottle of pills
laying on the bathroom floor,
like a smile too bright, too big,
like a phone call at night,
like a goodbye.
Desperation looks like everyday life.

The hall boozed with excitement.
The first exam of your GCSE—
it was a subject you could barely pass.

And so you sat, while everyone else
laughed, cried or revised,
you closed your eyes.
Your left hand on your right one’s wrist.
Adding pressure to it as if to stop the bloodflow.
More and more until someday
a blade would no longer terrify your brain.
Training yourself
for the moment you died.

I look in the mirror:
my ribs shape my frame,
like lines that never go away.
They cage my heart,
turn it small.

A week sick.
*****.
Smell of decaying flesh.
No food for a week.
Only the necessary water to live.
I couldn’t breathe.

Now it has sculpted my frame,
made it fragile and small.
I put a shirt on;
hide it, push it away.

Cleaning up my room.
Open a wardrobe that’s been closed for too long.
As old sketchbooks stack on the floor,
my hand reaches to touch a sharp blade
and a knife makes old memories bloom.
Everything feels red as words leave my throat,
the music on my headphones far away,
my body lost somewhere a few years ago.

A kid stealing a knife from the kitchen,
keeping it hidden and close out of instinct,
like the cat that stops eating when he feels death’s approach.

No scars fill my arms now,
but sometimes their texture reminds me of that time,
where I was a push away from falling into an addiction
that spills blood out of your system like pain went with it
and leaves marks on it that no words can take away.

There is a spider in the corner of my room,
and I’m deathly scared of spiders.
But I won’t **** her,
because aren’t spiders deathly afraid of humans too?
They should.
We ****** them, choke them, torture them to death.
We scream and break their eardrums at the mere sight of them,
we insult them.

I would.
If I was a spider, I’d be deathly scared of humans.
But no spiders **** humans and all humans **** spiders.
(Still, spiders are the monsters in every tale)
Why do we try to make everything we’re afraid of
disappear?,
instead of learning to cope
with the fear.

There is a spider in the corner of my room,
and I’m deathly scared of spiders,
but I won’t **** her.

She didn’t choose to be born that way.

I also know why the caged bird sings.
He does so because the bars were forged in hatred,
and the whole world has turned into a simple room,
as when your eyesight only reaches the horizon,
and you can’t walk past it anymore, you forget
there was anything ahead of it. The caged bird sings
because he thinks he chirps the truth, yet they are lies,
propaganda repeated from who first captured him.
The caged bird sings because blindly repeating
what he once heard like a mindless parrot
gives him a fake sense of freedom,
even when his only prison is his own mind.

Did you seriously think, sonofabitch,
that if you dressed in a luxurious enough suit,
the blood on your hands would fade?,
the fear you once awoke go pale?
Do you seriously think that silk
makes children come back to life?
Brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers.
All dead.
By your own hands.
And once again, I found you on the goverment,
because when you put enough silk
(enough money)
around your shady words,
people can suddenly turn a blind eye
on the bombs you once made explode.

She went shopping one day
to never come back.
They couldn’t even have her body at her funeral—
Oops! All we found was a tiny ****** arm.
Sorry about your mom, about your newborn.
You’ll never see either again.

Do you seriously think
that money will make them come back to life?
Not even as zombies they could rise,
because to do so their bodies would need to be more
than tiny little ******* scraps.