seams and stitching ♡ published

SCARS

people whisper, when they think
we can't hear them (over the raging storms
inside our chests that hurricane our heartbeats into
tsunamis pummeling floods of white noise
in our tornado-torn eardrums)
about our scars.

they want to know what horrible ghosts
haunt us-- that manifest themselves
as old torn flesh and ruptured veins and hard seams
festering like open wounds beneath our
decomposing epidermis.
they ask us how we got these scars.

"what could possibly have happened
to these people
to give them all these scars?"

i am not sure that you,
you, lungs unpolluted by smoke,
spirit unscathed by trauma,
soul unmarked by cruelty
skin untouched by sin,
would want to know.

but you insist, with your clear lungs
and pure spirit and holy soul
and soft skin.

we got these scars, you see,
climbing the barb-wire fences into heaven.

we got these scars, you see,
tearing our souls from our inadequate flesh
all the nights that memory convinced us
we were meant for more
than mere human existence,
caged in hollow bodies, confined
to the edges of sin-spoilt skin
and flame-licked bones.

we got these scars, you see,
untying the knots in our veins
when loss clotted our blood.
all the nights we mourned with the moon,
howling in immeasurable pain,
liquor soaked eulogies reeking
off our grief-striken bodies
under the pitiless, starless sky.

i told you these scars would be a gory mess
of pain and illogical anatomy and shredded purity.

we got these scars, you see,
slicing our wrists clean off our arms
with violin strings,
unmelodious, inharmonious blood flow,
strangling the life from our rhythmless limbs
in sorry attempts to steady our heartbeats
into empty silence in our overstuffed chests.

we got these scars, you see,
stitching and sewing each other's wounds closed
in the pitch black depths of hell
(or when our minds were inescapable oceans
and we were floundering helplessly, ignorant of buoyancy,
gasping for breath in the ruthless current
of our thoughts and memory)
our eyesight clouded by misjudgment and lack of knowledge
about our own godforsaken bodies
as our fingers fumbled with the thread,
ignorant of remedy.

we got these scars, you see,
arguing with God about the fate of our
traumatized souls, the jagged crowns of thorns
He laced into our hair as He crowned us
royalty of hell and sent us on our way
to the damned kingdom (in our own
polluted psyches).

i told you already, these scars
are the shackles we wear
chaining us to our imperfect and unholy bodies.
our bodies, unpossessed by light,
sleeping in the darkest shadows of ignorance
and impurity and mistake.

we got these scars, you see,
all the nights we peeled off layers of skin
one by one by one
hoping that if we ever got deep enough
we would reach heaven and be able to start over.