poem #1

warning: s3lf h4rm/su1c1d3 mentions My smile falls after holding it for a second too long. It feels weird. It feels wrong. It feels like my teeth don’t fit in my mouth, but they are my gums. My eyes wander and unfocus like a camera lens, snapping blurry photos without the glasses I need to see 6 inches in front of my face. The memory card must be full. Not with pleasant reminders of once was but unsettling trails and paths I never wanted to walk. I stare at my hands with a blank expression, they’re mine. I’m typing, I’m eating, I’m sorting stickers and putting merchandise out on the floor. These hands have harmed themselves so many times. So many times I’ve burned them, sliced them, bruised them. So many times have I broken my own flesh- intentionally and otherwise. I search for the words to describe my state of mind but they do not come. They linger in parts of my brain that I don’t think want to be discovered yet. I am in a better place. But today seems so futile. Yesterday is hard to process yet every second of the past still stings like a fresh cut with a sharp blade, oozing slowly with copper scented liquid that drip, drip, drips into my head with no signs of stopping. Sometimes it flows, sometimes it gushes, sometimes it drips ever so slowly it’s not too noticeable. But it never stops. I think about the year it all went wrong and the years it was wrong before that, the bottle of miscellaneous pills that sat on my air conditioner which ran at 60 degrees for hours every day. My room was freezing.

So was I.

So was I.