I’m Sorry
You are my most regrettable sin,
Forever with you, I shall sit alone…
In a field full of fractured seeds, waiting to be sown.
For you, I will grow a thicker skin.
Just so that with you, I can suffer through this grin.
My father took me to a circus.
It was one of those old fashioned ones. They’d used animals, still.
I’d seen that animal within its cage, its disposition all too similar to my own
It mattered not if I was onstage, or offstage.
There was not a moment where you or I did not ‘cheat out’.
Stage left.
Stage right.
Back Stage.
Onstage.
You and I were the clowns who ‘played’ everywhere.
For I, the jester was the only personality that I could encage
It didn’t matter in which way that they would stare
As long as my smile could be seen, it didn’t matter if it was more
than I could bear.
In my act of selfishness, It was you that I had made
Because I could no longer wear this jester’s mask alone.
And for this sin, I know that I shall never atone
I stole you away from your promenade…
Peeled you from a novel that was never mine.
Brought you into my life, where you were never meant to shine.
But I couldn’t bear it…
This biological function
The need to never be ‘alone’
If I had only known… god, if I had only known.
That my idea of strength was ‘sad’
And incomplete, like a forgotten draft upon a sketch pad.
Those childhood memories could never resonate within you, nor I.
We were xerox copies, printed within a black room
Duplicates, whose polaroid had bled, stained with obsidian dye.
I made you with the selfish request- to pick up the mask when I could no longer bear it
‘Please protect me’, I’d said. What a horrible sin that I commit.
For I should have known. Even ‘good’ memories are made at the expense of others.
The animals who put on their show, only to lay, as if dead within their cells.
The young actors and actresses, who will never again see their mothers.
To the ring leader, who wonders… Why does he deserve this hell?
Finally, that smiling jester… Whose world as long since lost all of its colors.