My tears used




to keep me alive


like cheap gasoline.
Every night I let the carpet
mold itself into the skin of my knees and I looked up at my ceiling and…
And I would sit there

as time crawled


across the floor like a cockroach with a crooked smile.
My homeless heart knowing exactly what it wanted yelled the answer but my tongue spoke a different language.
Sometimes the only word I could make out in my head was
“When”
So after a while of listening to the cannons in my heart exploding in my veins and setting fire to my cheeks I bowed my head in defeat.
I’ve been a silent statue ever since, carved by the echoes of nay-sayers and dollar-sign dreamers.
My skin stands, an ancient fort cracked on the inside from the countless casualties of my personality.
Deceased traits run scraped, loyally bruised fingers across my thoughts, and say “when will flesh and thought become one thing?”
In that moment silence says never.
Because they will only see my Porcelain plastic cover-up exoskeleton and the shape of Cupid’s bow painted on my lips.










The penmanship of my body shape that writes “forgettable” all along the edges like a broken record repeated.
Magazines and perfect figurines whisper lullaby lies to almost-not-quites that a white smile is the best smile.
Not my smile, stained with rust and the dried blood of words I have never had the courage to say.
Not my smile, a smile with teeth like yellowish vapor floating and fleeting and never the same shape.
Who could look at a broken frame like mine and see beauty in eyes that look like a child forgot to color inside the lines.
And that’s why I always think of myself as two separate beings.
I took a needle and some thread and sewed my lips shut long ago, so the disguise of a smile you thought you saw once is never coming back.
The letter my heart wrote to whatever lives above my ceiling is branded on the tip of my tongue and hasn’t seen the light of day since the hour I lost my mind;
The hour that rendered me a colorblind soul that hasn’t seen real beauty in 19 years.
I confess that the smile you see is a smoke-screen time machine from before I knew I would die someday.
My confession is I will flip myself inside out like a pillow case,
When.