I have a soft spot for broken melodies, dark words
and repressed emotions.  

These are the kind I know like the marks on my torso
pale branches to deceive countless shadows
within.  Each consumed the spirits
of kindness, adventure and innocence, supplanting the child
permitting a deformed entity, possessed
with crime-less guilt and constant
troubling thoughts--of losses
never truly known.  

A miracle, one might call it, that skin and thin flesh
have not imploded.  
Not yet.  Perhaps

the body is too stiff, too stubborn.  Perhaps
the will has enough still to stretch, stretch,
stretch, stretch
yet
until the frail rubber finally
snaps

where then
will the sanity be, where then
will life go?