You are seeing these words for the first time, shiny and new they are to you,
Glistening with the light of the screen
and dripping with the pride of its writer.
You read them and find yourself in them,
or you see them and pity me.
But you'll read them for the first time,
like seeing a person and judging their cover before hearing their story.
They are my face in absence of my face,
they are what you see and judge.
These words are me for me,
they look new so you read.
But I have seen these words so many times before they flash before your eyes.
They have haunted me
and I have conquered them,
they have comforted me
and I now give them,
they have crushed me and I have risen,
they have killed me and I,
I have died a thousand deaths
trying to live up to them.
They seem new because
I have shined them with my tears,
they drip with pride because they have drowned out all of the fears
I had in keeping them in,
they have not sunk under my demons,
they glisten with the sweat that pain brings
and the soreness that my muscles sing
as they try to tell you what I've been through.
These words are not words.
They are not the shapes
that make letters that make sense.
They are not just scars and mars and marks on my back and on the sky...
They are the questions and the answers why everything is as it has been and ought to be.
They are a messy, bloody, despicable history that has some hope that
it doesn't always have to be like this.
For I am nothing without some hope,
have nothing if not the ability to cope
with all this futility and inevitable doom
they keep telling me about.
Sometimes I can truly see myself going mad over all theses thoughts;
Losing my mind to all of their besotted whims and letting my sanity stretch thin
over all of their desires.
And then there are times like now,
when my mind feels sore,
feels like it can't take anymore
staring or watching or thinking;
this is when I think I've already lost it.
So you might think these words are new,
think that these thoughts just dropped out of the clear blue sky and into my lap,
that this poem was just a flittering thing that I scribbled down for amusement and claps.
But these words will tell a story if you let it,
and if you listen maybe you'll get to meet me, the real me.
I think you'll agree that
I'm more insane than here,
and more normal than weird.
But if I'm honest,
those are the parts that I like best.
I'll let my words tell you the rest.
SK
