i am a mess of broken strings and branching neurons that will never quite reach their intended purpose and i am a creature that loves like arsenic. i am curling flames that make their way into your heart and nest there with no intention of ever leaving and this is my problem; i never know when it is time to take my inhibitions and my shortcomings and get on a bus that will drop me off in your left ventricle, where i can smooth out my broken pieces and start again. i am a bird who can't fly and relies on others to take me up into the clouds because my potential overshadows my reality and i have never learned to escape mediocrity as it chases me onto a dead end street. i am all parts and no wholes; i am all fragments that won't fit together and no amount of glue will repair my shattered sense of self or my crippled brain that loves so intensely it drives people away. i am a line so long i can't even begin to look for the front so i settle into waiting and let it become my personality, let it become my everything because here is now and there is then and the timeline of my life has never been a straight line; it has always been a zigzag of humanity that folds back in on itself despite my mumbled protests. i am not a phoenix - when i have burnt to ashes i do not wish to be reborn because i have always been a loaded pistol and embers don't mix with gunpowder (i know this because i have been an inevitable explosion since the day my mother first held me in her arms). i am a surplus of pride and shame in the form of hidden tears and crumpled papers but i have always been older than my years and the anomaly in me has never been extinguished; maybe this is why when i look down at myself, i see only marks and freckles and imperfections instead of the blinding glare of my rattled soul. i am Hiroshima with its enormous power (too great to be contained) that dissolves my judgment into fine white powder and scatters it over dead soil like a twisted mosaic on a mottled canvas. i am poison - you will know this part of me if you reach past my organs into my core where my fears rest, if you get too close for comfort and my electric fence of a heart shocks you back. i am a being that never learned to love the right way so i love all the wrong ways and if you get caught in my crosshairs from where i stand above, you should run. i never learned how to escape myself, or my arsenic heart, and this is my problem. this will always be my problem.