pretty / ugly words

lips raw - bitten down words, spinning room, i'm running in circles...

.

i cut out my tongue to ask what it did wrong

open the cabinet, my heart's been hung

carve another piece away, pray, maybe they'll stay

maybe i'll shatter, the silence will shake, hands quake

ugly crawls out of my skin, a warped mirror with a twisted grin

it whispers to me, pulls me in, i struggle in its grasp and i watch it all dissipate.

i was this tall yesterday and i'll be this tall tomorrow. i have long since missed my chance to reach further towards the heavens and the sky. age is carved into bone, and letters set in stone. but i am different today. and i will be different tomorrow. i exist in this moment and i will exist differently in the next, that is how we grow. slowly. unnoticeably.

each day greeted with eyes made anew, seeing things old and new, this world is wide and i do not know everything. while i am the same height today, and will be the same height tomorrow, still i grow. we grow.

i feel so restlessly. my fingers dance and my eyes play hopscotch, activate my fight or flight, i’m running in circles searching for something to feel like searching the pantry for something to eat

i’m alive

i’m alive

when i turned 18 my mother gifted me her anger.

hers, her mother’s, and the mothers that came before, 

i hold centuries of bitten tongues and bitter rage, 

lifetimes of resentment for daughters that became everything they wished to be and never were

i think i was supposed to let it go, but somewhere along the way i gave it a home in me, and a place on my windowsill, and i began to water it daily and watch it grow, let it take root in a hand-painted terracotta pot with a nametag scrawled in sharpie on the bottom.

...we lay side by side,

       ...your thigh brushed mine, warm.

              ...i whisper my fears to a dark ceiling, 

                      ...you taste them in the air and turn them to bullets in your mouth.

your eyes are so kind...

who molded your hands into the shape of violence?

who taught you how to hurt?

i wish i could weave sound into a blanket, so i could curl into the sound of your voice, drape it over my cold feet.

they say you forget laughter first but i hold yours tight, tucked up under my chin, so the monsters can’t get in, like we used to do when we were kids, do you remember that?

i can’t bring you back, but i can wrap you around my shoulders, and imagine that it is your arms, and this is a hug, and i am safe again.

no daughter can save her mother.

those six feet are dug before you know where your feet are, and the casket lowered before you even turn the big one-oh, 

but here i am. in the graveyard, garden trowel in cold-bitten hand, talking to a headstone with all of the people you should have been carved beneath your name, a mother, never one of them.

and i dig. and i dig, and i dig, i’d let the earth eat away at my finger-tips and tree rot take shelter in my lungs if it meant your six feet became mine, and i could give you back the life i stole when you gave me my first breath.

for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

a baby is born and a bullet takes a life.

what is the purpose? what is the purpose?