I am a ragdoll stuffed with two-cent cotton imitation in a factory in China.
My arms and legs moved by hands seen through mismatched button eyes.
my only desire is to be like other dolls: Barbies, Polly Pockets.  Big eyes and plastic bodies.

My pills come in a bottle like a gumball machine, dispensing one brightly colored sphere at a time.  

Pills to make me, like them.

The artificial emotion seeping into my veins.
Sweating out my pores.
Plastering smiles on my face, and ironing rainbow patches behind my eyes.

A giant sugar-coated crutch shoved under my armpit.
Force-fed lying happiness.

Here comes the choo-choo into the tunnel.

I am a cat eating grass to make itself *****.

I want to move my own ragdoll arms, sit up without a metal pole behind my back.
I want a straight line stitched on my face so I can choose to make it go down.
Or up,
Or diagonal,
Or shed my potato-sack skin and metamorphose into a trumpet.
With freedom to resound over mountaintops,
Dribble liquid gold from my singing mouth.

But I am a ragdoll.

Whose head is stuffed with two-cent cotton imitation on a factory floor in China.

Whose only desire is to be real.

So, I've decided to talk in pen, because pens are smoother.
Pencils scratch, pens slide like honey out of your spoon in to a cup of tea.
A pen does not stumble, a pen does not falter, no, a pen makes a bold mark on a blank piece of paper.

It stands out.

A pen is shouting loud into the sky,
"I am here, I am permanent, I am not to be taken lightly, I matter."
A pen can make mistakes, but they are ******* hard to erase.
Because, you know what?
A mistake is part of a pen's path, and what it has written before matters just as much as what it writes next.

I have decided to write in pen, because my voice is never going to be erased.

Can we appreciate our differences and evaluate ourselves not based on others' accomplishments in comparison to our own?

Can we take each setback with a grain of salt and let it blow away as we exhale our failures?

Can we see a person with what they want as successful, not competition?

Can we see those with what we want as friends, not stepping stones on the path to our own ambitions?

Can we appreciate the validity of each individual's desires, and cheer them on as they strive to reach them?

Will we ever learn to love the differences that make us human?

Every time,
The world is spinning,
Far too fast for my eyes to follow it,
And things just seem,

     Out of control.

Spilled milk,
Spilled tears,
Spilled tomorrows,

Careful son,
     You've got hate on your hands,

See what happens,
Trying to calm,
Roiling seas,
With a thin, straight line,
Crooked bones,

I inhale,
I exhale,

I whisper

Find the beauty,
Follow it,

Follow it.

Your legacy lies behind closed eyes,
The wind teasing eyelashes that would only part for God,
And though you are gone, I remember,
The songs that kept you alive,
Irish folk songs from previous generations,
Sung to you by a family,
That you only remembered half of,
And my voice mixing with yours,
In harmony,
And melody,
And verses upside down and out of order,
We’d laugh,
Then we’d leave,
Then we’d cry,
As we remembered yesterday,
Your eyes were full of life,
True blue to the end,
And though waxen and still,
You belong in our hearts,
Forever.

I caress every angle,
Every curve,
Every rise and fall,
Every swell of your unified chaos, caught,
Behind black bars,
The sonorous bass,
Like boulders rumbling beneath my feet,
Walking on the concrete,
Conducting my heartbeat,
Your resonant forte flowing through my veins,
Lighting a cold fire deep inside my chest,
Submerging my body in fluid sound,
Making my fingertips tingle,
As waves of audible emotion intertwine with my soul,
And let me feel,
But all must come to a close,
Everybody knows,
They sigh and say, "That’s just the way it goes"
Like ashes blown away on an errant wind,
You leaves me with a silence so loud, my ears ring.
But I can hear my spirit sing,
Like boulders rumbling beneath my feet,
Walking on the concrete,
Answering my heartbeat.

And so it was,
A bitter thing,
Like licorice: black and sour,
The two of them,
The worst of friends,
The mood severe and dour,
One jeers and spits,
The other hits,
They're falling blow by blow,
Extinguished flame,
No one to blame,
A breath and it was so.

A heart is such a funny thing, it moves to its own beat,
A thrumming, drumming, pulsing thing, that's pumping blood and heat,
And though it is a part of me, I still feel disconnected,
The heart that lives inside my chest knows it has been rejected,
And so it sits, yearning for you, and here I am beside it,
My thoughts a blur, my heart a-stir, for love that's unrequited.

I had love once,
I had it in my chest,
In my forehead,
Flowing out of my fingertips.
I had love once,
Made my heart gallop sideways
To a rhythm in a symphony only we could hear.
I had love once,
I had it all the way home
When your lips
Whispered into my cheekbones,
"goodbye."
I had love once,
Once upon a time
When the glass slipper still fit my two left feet.
I was in love once,
When sweet spring breezes
Gently tucked my hair behind one ear.
I hated love once,
because while I closed my eyes,

waiting,

You plucked each puzzle piece from inside me,
And left me with a half-finished picture of what love is supposed to be.

Late nights with itchy fingers and waiting paper,
With trampoline eyelids and legs still mid-race,
With home so far away you can't talk to it with a can and a string and a secret,
And silence,
Filling your ears with cotton ***** soaked in maple syrup,
Late nights with rusty elbows and creaky knees,
The darkness a blanket of barbs coating the air that flows in and out of your mouth,
And chamomile dreams just a hair too far away to sip,
Those are the nights where happy meets a cliff,
And sad comes rushing up to greet it,
Entangling and intertwining,
Birthing a melancholy mood that dives into your pores,
Prolonging those late nights.

As I gaze into the mirror, mother, I do not see,
I am blind, mother, so very blind,
Blinded by hate, bitter and hot in the back of my throat,
Hate towards the one that looks into the mirror,
The mirror in front of me,
Please mother, help me see.

The water envelops my body like liquid darkness
Each tendril of fluid wrapping around my wrists like sticky cellophane
And zip-ties tighten
And I claw
And I gnash my teeth
And I scrape each current with my toenails
as I kick
              and kick
                           and kick
        and kick
And the water flows through my fingers like whispering sand
And I am slowly being pulled under

I tell the tale of beginnings so hard they sting like concrete wall on broken right-hand knuckles.
I tell the tale of scraped knees, of palms full of gravel from sidewalk paved with disappointment.
I tell the tale of bitten fingernails, and bitten cheeks, and bitten lips, and bitten pencils, cracked joints, shuffled feet, downcast eyes.
I tell the tale of taking it, from whoever gives it.  Taking it and letting it seep in through pores you thought you’d covered up with band-aids.
I tell the tale of training each corner of your mouth to defy gravity, even though physics is just so hard to beat.
Though I tell these tales of grey and black and brown, I also tell bursts of red, of yellow paint sporadically spattered over bright azure sky.
I tell tales of pushing, pushing into that sidewalk with every millimeter of your body, straining to beat the gravity that keeps pulling your smile down.
Muscle takes work to build, and each day as your nose inches away from the ground, you will build memory, build houses.
Brick houses that even the Big Bad Wolf can’t blow in, despite his astounding lung capacity and sheer force of will.
And every time he tries to muster up a breath, you can tickle him ‘til he laughs all that air out.
Because you can play ping pong with physics
And tie helium-filled balloons to your lips so they rise to the heavens,
And physics has a ****** backhand serve, so you can beat him with both eyes closed.

Just a little verse for you,
One for days of black and blue,
One for days of rain that pours,
When the wind knocks on your doors.

Just remember to go on,
With every night there comes a dawn,
See the sunlight in my eye,
I look at you, and see the sky.