Poem 27: Slam Poem - Problems

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Problems

You think you have life problems? 

Why don’t you look at her calendar,

With every day,
She's washing it away
in the shower...

The guilt, the shame, the blame, and everything else that
live in the cracks in her skin,

Her skin,
that tells so many stories about how she felt when the blame was dealt,

And the dealt turned into a
monster
that crept up on her at nights,
Snatching that lump in her throat and bringing it to life-

Her life...

Yeah,
you think yours is bad? 

Why don’t you peer into her heart
to see when she was glad? 

Her smile was so much brighter when the tears
and accusations
didn’t turn her into
a fighter-

Who could’ve grown up so differently if she might of, 

Heard different,
loved different,
gotten over it. 

But she can’t. 

They assume she’s the one putting stories
in their
heads,
but what they really don’t know
is that when she goes to bed,
she can’t
think
straight. 

She feels as though her heart is made of lead-
and all the
good thoughts,
the good times,
they’ve all been put to rest...

So has her voice. 

That which carries through the
sound of silence
that suddenly surrounds her
when she realizes that
everyone takes it the
wrong way. 

Don’t tell her to get better-
don’t tell her to be fine,
and most of all
don’t tell her
that she was
out
of
line

With university and the
diversity of what she feels-
don’t you ever tell her that’s something to seal-
up in an envelope,
alone with the others,
in the drawers
full of imaginary knifes,
scissors,
and cutters,

Don’t you tell her it was her fault-!

Don’t you use your voice as a weapon to repel what she needs to say,
about how she’s juggling day-to-day with university
and
her future
on the way...

There’s only one person she can talk to. That she knows will listen
and they’re half her age,
can’t you tell what she’s missing? 

Trust

It’s a tricky concept but sometimes
you just need someone to give it to...
In hard times and easy,
but these aren’t the good days
when trust was a game
you played
as someone
caught you. 

Her trust in herself is depleting.
She think she is a burden,
that she should
run away
and forget
that she’s hurting. 

But you don’t see
how she walks
when she feels this way-
It's a walk
that you use when you're mourning the  day-

Because
her life
is falling,
just like you in the game,
except there’s no one to catch her, no one to catch the blame

She just needs someone to understand, someone more
than herself,
someone with a greater plan,
because she’s
lost in a world
full of people jumping
to conclusions-
is really is
pretty easy
to forget what you’re
doing.

But she’s living,

at least-
she’s trying to,
with her past slipping through the cracks,
what else could she do?

But move on. 

She says she doesn’t care,
so you believe her?
Instead of using that
as despair-
Against her opinion,
against what she
thinks,
stop telling her
she’s lying-
She doesn’t know that her sky is being clouded with black inks,

As you
slack off
and tell her that she needs
to get her
life
back-!

No...

Her calendar is full of scheduled numbers,

From appointments,
to prescriptions,
to days where she wishes
she would be
buried
under the
umber. 

Maybe
one day
her calendar will
stop,
and then
her hopes
will drop, 

Because that’s the day when she reaches the top,

Of the
highest cloud-
out of her inked sky, 

Because
that’s
where
good
people 
go
when
they

die

So you underestimated her, 

You underestimated her feelings, 

All those times
when you assumed
she didn’t know
what she was
dealing with, 

Well,
she tried
her best
at
everything
she did...

Don’t you say you have life problems. 

[em]

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