The wails resounding in my mind

are etched deeply in my soul

buried deeper than scars on skin

enduring craters impressed on heart.

Mind scars hidden with scarves

marking dusty paths of

serpentine streets of the past.

I tear chunks of my layers

to erase the wounds

scar tissue is dying forlorn

but memory lives forever.

Crushed ice blisters

can’t be healed by whiskey

but I hide my scars in stars

where they are unseen

in blackest night.

If I am not my scars, tell me, 

What am I?

I am not

a writer

a poet

or a painter

I am not a saint

I am not

the person I want to be

I am the person I pretended

I could not become

I am words on a page

I am strokes on a canvas

I am a face in the mirror

I am a sinner

I am fear

I am the hunter

I am the scars 

that were caused by my own hand

while living a life

I do not want to live.

To you,

with the voice like branches,

crisp throat and bird-tongued:

isolation took you nowhere

except sprouted limbs in the roots of your scalp

and grew resentment to the big man in the sky.

I’ve always associated you with thunder,

with windowpanes, borrowed rain,

and the occasional telephone cracks

that carried our voices past Nevada and Kentucky.

I became fluent in silence years ago, but you still heard me

seas away, and we washed the night with dilated pupils.

I wanted to hold the moon,

milky rinds like my plastic bag flesh –

pliant and flimsy and at the edge of blooming wings.

We were only fourteen, with hairline cracks

seamed across china glass skin,

you were chipped in the most beautiful way

and I thought if I carefully engulfed you

between wrinkled palms

like the nestled warmth of a newborn bird,

you could be fixed.

It was the summer I grew a year

in three months,

you showed me sun-kissed wrists

and the art of shrinking

through whistle fingers and teacups.

We were skins of ocean water,

bodies woven from hurricanes and cherry-lipped horizons,

half empty with a belly full of stones.

You, with the stomach stuffed with graveyards,

churned oceans of crimson corpses from your esophagus.

You were always the one with the best stories,

the loudest laugh, the biggest smile,

you said you liked the feel of adrenaline

draped across your shoulders

at five in the morning,

you said you never felt more alive

bathed in a thousand shards and veins and blood.

What were you thinking

when you scraped a silver blade against your throat,

were you scared?

Did you forget how humans weren’t made

to be sliced, were never chiseled statues

or fistfuls of organs from gutted fish?

What was it like to forget yourself,

to not recognize the angles of your limbs, your ankles,

to watch your knuckles wither, curl like dying leaves?

Maybe this is what death tastes like,

squeezed between your irises like unwanted pearls,

polishing an artificial smile,

maybe this is where we first began to decay –

between visions and illusions,

medusa in the mirror and distorted appendages,

eyes grow old after a hundred days of interpretation.

It’s that time of year again –

when crows cease commentations

and clouds roast themselves until burnt,

I am still clasping onto one end

of this yellow diamond sky,

half bleached with your mayonnaise bones,

the moon screams hunger, hunger.

I can imagine your wild horse eyes

capturing every motion of wind.

We are breathing, we are alive

but our faces wilt under indigo light.

This is how we’ll grow –

sleep-deprived,

but forever dancing.

The indents

Upon my skin

Old yet new

Ugly but beautiful

Gross yet not

Pale patch

Lines across

Some overlap

Some do not

My brush

Of a blade

Painted a picture

In all red

All over my arms

All over my legs

Hanging by a thread of the past

Desperate for these scars to fade away

Starving for sanity that would never last

There is not enough time in a day

This is who I am, who I am meant to be

My heart may have been crippled

These scars are meant for everyone to see

My ever-lasting soul shows no ripples

The past may have cut me open to some degree

I kept on closing my vein to be free

It drained the dignity out of me

No matter what I will be wearing these scars for eternity.

Smooth to the touch.

Pale to the eye.

Oh how you once hurt.

Oh how I did cry.

Gut wrenching pain.

Endless first aid.

I hoped that one day.

You soon would fade.

Month after month.

You never left me.

You stayed by my side.

For each being to see.

Soon you fit in.

Like one of the stars.

I will never forget.

One of my first scars.

Others assume I'm an open book,

but in reality, that's far from the truth.

They soon notice the physical scars,

the two on my head and two on my hip.

They become suspicious, so I must tell them,

the pain I have been through.

This opens up the book for them,

they see every one of my scars.

They see the uncertainty,

the pain and suffering.

They see the lies I tell myself,

the ones that scar my heart.

With that, they learn to distance themselves,

thinking it's what I want.

This only scars my pride and trust,

making them all the more visible

to others.

scars all over her

    arms and legs

she carries them so well

i forget sometimes that i know they're

             there

when she reaches for me

         and i glance

the lamp shade tilts with my eyes

revealing a hundred solutions neatly healed on the softest parts of her skin.

a trillion alternate endings

        of how pens don't bleed like razors

and I tell her that I understand

because I believe that they do

each syllable starts with a prick

each line pouring it's heart out

stanzas spaced just in case

there needs to be another incision

and there always is

hidden somewhere

within the pages

If today you where to look at me you would see someone completely different. 

Someone broken and battered, left behind.

If you where to look at me 5 years ago you would see someone completely different.

Someone lost and fearful, but existing. 

If you where to look at me 10 years ago you would see someone completely different.

Someone whole hearted and trusting, hopeful.