I remember that morning,
It was raining,
It was pouring,
It tasted like tears,
    Mostly because I was crying
    And I was bleeding
        Because I punched a wall,
Because I saw it all.

I saw how the world could stop and walls could shatter,
I saw that birds could fly backwards,
And the dictionary was not large enough to pack all the words I longed to scream at the top of my lungs into a crowd of six thousand,
I saw that a brick wall doesn’t show the stain of blood very well,
But you can always see the remnant of torn flesh on its gritty surface.

The pain of that rain,
The pain of that blood,
The pain of those tears,
    Were nothing-
        nothing compared to what was taken from me.


And here I am months later.
My hand has healed, scarred over. A pink discoloration remains.
But the only pain I still feel is in these lines,
    The only thing that’s real.

-July 20th 2013