Lifelong Companions

There is a monster in my belly
There it lives and there it lies
There it breathes and there it dies
There it waxes, wanes, and whines.
There is a monster in my belly.
There it shrieks and cries and screeches
There it rips and tears and scratches
There it gnaws and claws and slashes
There is a monster in my mind
There it fled after a rut
Had been dug inside my gut
There it lingers in the shadows
There it prowls and growls and swallows
There it conquers me completely.
There it waits, beneath my bed
There it lurks, inside my head
Check behind the closet door,
Can’t you hear it as it snores?
“Dear, it’s all inside your head.”
There is a monster in my head.
It used to live inside my belly.
But it chose my brain instead.

Parallel Universe

I hear the tick-tick-tap of a lesson being written on the board of another room,
Where someone like me sits perched in her chair,
Scrawling down names,
and dates,
and a laundry list of facts,
Glancing at the clock with a sigh.
She gets bored of her routine:
She wakes up to an incessant, grating alarm every morning when the sun first stirs.
She spends an hour getting ready to present herself to people who will forget her name.
She listens to a love song and envies the singer's experiences.
She forgets if she has her own.
She walks to class and arms herself with a notebook,
Scribbling pretentious poetic verses in the margins,
and copying someone else's words in between,
and drifting off into the tick-tick-tap of someone else's life.

You look different.

You look different without glasses.
Who are you trying to impress?
Without those thick plastic frames and smudged glass lenses,
your eyes seem so thoroughly naked.
I'm afraid to take too long of a glance,
lest I trespass into your mind.
I wish you would put them back on,
because I can't see you clearly without my own,
and I can't offer you myself the way you're being offered to me.

Regrets

Maybe when we kissed,
I opened my mouth too wide,
and a layer of my heart got trapped within your jaws.
Maybe when we spoke,
I forgot to coat my words in shadows,
and I unveiled my tongue's intentions too quickly.
Maybe when I'm with you,
I let my guard down,
and maybe I regret that.
Maybe next time,
I'll sew myself shut.

State of Mind

Sometimes,
I like to plug my ears
and close my eyes
and live inside my head.

Choke

I choke on my words.
They pool up in my mouth until I can't swallow them
and then they block my throat and I can't breathe.

I squirm and scream and struggle
but they continue to choke me
and they begin to pour from my mouth and wrap around my neck
and they form a rope, a noose
and tighten around my neck like a great snake.

I stop fighting.
I can't anymore because I'm weak against the power of suffocation
and my muscles relax
and my head stops spinning
and there's a sudden warmth over my body
and now I feel like maybe it was for the best
and then everything fades...

and all I see

is darkness.

Bitter Truths

When I was little, I tasted baker's chocolate.
I snatched it up greedily,
with stubby, sticky fingers
and devoured it whole,
before realizing, with a gag,
that it was nothing like the chocolate I had known before.
It was bitter, and dark,
without caramel or nougat
or peanuts or almonds
to weaken its sour flavor.
I had envisioned the sweetness
the sugar that would linger on my tongue...
I was met with a strong, ugly taste--
a hideous taste--
I couldn't swallow.
I couldn't bring it to my throat.
I chewed it quickly
(I had to finish)
I chewed it, my eyes squeezed shut,
my nose pinched between my pointer finger and thumb.
I gulped it down and flushed out my mouth,
with water, with milk, with soda, with juice, with a spoon of pure white sugar,
but the taste never left; it was there the next day and the next week and the next month and the next year
and the next year, and the next year, and the next--

And the next decade, and the next century,
until I was rotting beneath the ground
until the worms gnawed at my decaying flesh
until I dissolved into dust,
until the dust became earth,
and the Earth became nothing,
and I was nothing, too,
and I simply ceased to be.

But that's how we grow up.