Where is
Every cratered face, riddled with acne,
Every body shamefully cowering underneath baggy jeans and
Layer upon layer of concealer,
Every 'fat girl' and every 'gay guy',
Cellophane-wrapped packages found defective before delivery,
Methodically identified by the label
Haphazardly slapped onto their backs?
Perhaps they have left with her,
The girl who sat idly in the back of the class,
Intimidated by flourescent spotlights,
Slicing into her eyes like the glaring stares she had become accustomed to.
Blinded, she slumped downwards,
Escaping to a phone,
The only light she could bear.
Retreating to a world
Where sunlight streamed from the hills
And a new dawn was approaching to greet a forest of lost souls.
There existed she, the only tree standing still upon the hill,
The only body to bask in the chance of a new dawn.
Her limbs were branches on the birch,
Weathering the winds that whispered and insulted,
Growing frail as each gust thinned the trunk and trimmed the tree,
Wounded the wood and battered the branches,
Lacerated the leaves and brutalized the bark in
Defiant, rebellious
Mutilation,
She caressed her oaken hair and
Remembered to cultivate an excuse
For the splotches of blue brutally inflicted on her bodice and
The slivers of red ribboning under sleeves,
Snakes hissing her secrets
A sting of
Numbing calm that left her
Teary-eyed with regret in an empty bathroom,
Dangling over a toilet in the place of worthless shit.
She would be heard, if not through words, than by actions for
In her chaotic concoction was an unwillingness to accept,
A refusal to respect
The most grievous sin of man: silence.
But in her quest for speech, she finds
She cannot go on.
The forest is her only home, so she returns, defeated,
But contrasted by the light of nothing other than the sun.
If only she hadn't been lost before her time,
By a quiet hum
That rose to a cacaphony of shrieks,
Overbearing to that girl who bore the weight of the world.
"I never asked for this," she cried,
But the murmurs were not audible
Behind layers and layers of tape
To white out the blackness within those that survive.
A compound of restriction defining beauty,
The weight of knowing,
The number on a scale is not enough,
It will never be enough,
And if it was,
Why was she taken?
