There are days I could scrub at my skin until I disappear
And there are days I find it difficult to even wash my hands
He really did ruin me

If I am like a book
Then he scribbled into the margins with ink
And so, I tore the pages out to get rid of him
But I never felt like me again
So I kept ripping and ripping into myself
And now I am just an empty shell
And I have nothing else to rip
But at least my cover is pretty

In my head I scream,
Struggling to hold onto myself
With recovery comes decay.
My soul is rotting,
Spreading infection around my vital organs.
My heart beats out of time
And my lungs struggle for oxygen.
Yet somehow my brain keeps whirring.
Forgotten memories play out on my eyelids,
Like a cinema showing the horrors of my past.
I sometimes wish they had never medicated the rotting of my brain,
Perhaps then I’d be happy.

Here lies the decrepit corpse of my fractured youth.
Here lies it’s gravestone, complete with Braille inscriptions of thick purple lines of regret.
Over the yonder lies an empty tomb, robbed of its memories from its creator.
Under it lies two coffins, the splintered wood allowing short painful breaths.
Here lies my barely fused together bones, my beautiful exterior ruined from within
And oh yes I agree, its such a great pity.

Time and time again I give up
I stop ignoring what happened
I relive the memories
Each time this happens
I feel a part of me begin to fade away
My soul is filled with holes from times like these
They can’t be seen and they never heal
The thing about PTSD
Is that it can’t be undone
It can’t be forgotten
We come in all shapes, sizes, colours
The thing about victims of ****** abuse is
We would be tremendous bird houses.

I was born with unmarked skin
My capillaries filled with ink
The breadth of my body looked empty
Yet I was made of all colours
Whilst others were filled with words
I always looked blank
Aggravated
He dug into my untarnished parchment
Letting the ink spill out of me
Until I became that of the absence of light

We used to masquerade down icy streets
And let our hair get stuck in our hats
Frozen puddles would whisper
And coax us to the water
which crunched underneath our boots with every step that we’d take.
Blizzards weighed down your pockets
And I’d braid the cold into your hair
It glittered.
I would stitch frost into your skin
And turn your tears into icicles
Because you said that I was cold, like the winter
But I always knew you secretly preferred the summer anyway

I am more than the belt shaped bruises that you roughly painted into my skin;
Shading darker colours to where the cold metal ridges cut into my back
Red is caused by the propensity of isolated particles to backscatter light more forcefully in the blue.
…..It should never have been caused by you.
I should not be veiled with a thick gauze of scar tissue
Forming ugly purple and red ridges into my complexion.
I should not bear the full weight of my past as I take off my clothes
And see the colour red embellishing my limbs.
But I do, and for as long as I live, I shall.

I could see the white flag begging to fly, the sadness pushed out from my face like a foreign body pushes its way to the surface.
I could see the loneliness that was once so well hidden, pristine clear as it buried deeper in the wrinkles that have begun to form on my once smooth skin; so different to the image before me.
A fool could notice though, the cracks in my smile. The years I had to practice; that fake smile was a sick talent, one not taught but easily learnt.
The clothes that I was once forced to wear sit on my lonely shell of a body, they didn’t belong there.
His figure, under his own hand, forced into a sad image of having too much control over me, causing his skin to fall pale and drape uncomfortably from his tired, beaten bones.
The place of a small child is not under the hd of a man, it is to sway gently in their arms in total peace. But there was a monster hidden under his crooked smile, which looked so perfect in the family photograph.
“Smile for the camera please”

Cigarettes long to be held between our lips
Finding solace as we inhale their essence
Our lungs fill with their solitude
Their venom glows
As they are kissed until they turn to ash
Death runs its fingers down our spines
It desires both of us.