1

The art of growing up is teaching your skin to become a mask factory
All the orifices stuffed with paper , tainted with ****** poetry

My transgression is to pretend a part of me is still innocent
calling back to my own instinct , be as dead as a statue

2

Some nights, I am left in moods
I thought I have left behind ,
guilty feelings over my wife
mopping up the mess
of my self-evisceration

I remember as a child I would feel
bad for standing outside
obstructing sunlight from
a boy shaped patch of grass

now, in my mid-thirties,
a part of me still has not
grown secure,

wanting to stay quiet
about wounds, who
still sometimes
feels the echoes

of being told
how worthless I am ,
at nine after
harvesting a whole
onion field by hand,

or the times younger

left with the responsibilities
of alleged adults,
the ******* who hated
his life and fatherhood ,

or the mentally ill woman
who would’t get off the couch
to do anything except ****
my pets in front of me
when I was behind on chores

they are the ones who called
themselves farmers

and they have left seeds
which I have tried pulling
out of my bones,
but you always look insane
when trying to circumvent
your own skin

sometimes at night,
I can feel a bumper crop
coming on

3

Because I love to be not loved

they will ask me what my damage is

and I will say impiety is a comfort

when one was raised with grace used as a weapon

my future is a success if others fail to make sense of me

4

I learned what innocence is,

birth throws us into a world
gentle and illiterate ,

we age, hording weaponry
our skin turns to armor
by reading sharp edges,

this is a world of broken glass streets
every human soul a bottle ready
to fall off its shelf