i have sifted the wound in my chest for dreams gone soft with rot, spending my days stripping away the layers, as if disappointment were a skin with no depth.

how far must i carve this hollow before the marrow flickers through, before i can lift my bones like relics—fragile, foolish, still shadowed by the amaryllis that once stood, its memory lingers, refusing to die?

one would never understand the things i endured
just to become bruised into softness.
like a graveyard beaten down
by the endless steps of mourners—

each footprint a weight of wanting,
each step a trial of trying.

how strange, that what i desired most became the very thing that left me hollow. teeth pressing on these lips, crimson whispers itself away, staining the dark. my chest caves, my hands remember violence, fingernails carve crescents into my palms—

all this, just so i could tame these tendencies,
until my hands forget their fists
and tremble into quiet.

the place where i am is kinder than that of outside.

here, it has no shade of light—where i cannot be seen naked with all these wounds and bruises, all these incarnadine lines in both my wrists, thighs, and all that there is that became my canvas to paint away the heaviness in my chest out of crimson patches.

here, it smothers the gray smoke my skin excretes—hiding the rousing fume of my melting and clawed body.

here, i don't have to peel off my skin to expose all the decaying layers under it—stretched throughout my forlorn body i've been hiding behind poem bandages.

here, i don't have to fold myself to hide the most disgusted fragments of me—my body and bones perfectly fit in the soil delineated by the chrysanthemum flowers—waiting to be buried.

sometimes being here made me want not to be saved and let my body soaked in too much dark euphemism to decompose. besides, any place outside here that has light only unveil all of my deformities.

any place outside here is tormenting.
any place outside here is cruel.
any place outside here is a curse.

darling, any place outside here
makes me despise myself more
and just want to disappear.