I Raise My Voice and Eternally Grow Up

I raise my voice 

Not only so that those without one can be heard,

But to scream for myself,

To bring justice to my soul,

To release a throbbing agony,

So as to make beauty out of cracked sternums and fleshy hearts.

The ease of dripping soft honey from a spoon. 

 

There is a little girl

Caged in the corner of my ribs in a titanium box.

She knew how to scream. 

She used to paint all over the walls,

Create her own personal masterpieces.

She used to just do without a single thought of what the masculine society would think. 

But someone picked her up,

Cloned her,

Sculpted the clone into a pawn,

Gave her two names: “I” and “Me”.

They threw Me across the board.

I landed somewhere else,

A place without the purity or the freedom.

I slipped on a monochromatic uniform.

I saluted. 

My fingers took a dip into my pockets and pulled out the compass. 

It read: LOST in the assembly lines of academia. 

 

‘Mistake’, a word the little girl couldn’t form between her lips, teeth, and tongue

Now played in loop.

And every “mistake” felt like a body fallen on a thousand needles. 

I ran to the nearest intersection only to find a 4-way with every street branded ‘Practical’.

And every street seemed to dance around, disguise themselves as another. 

I hooked the hood of my uniform to the top of these four signs,

Let it whirl me around for a while. 

I plopped to the ground and wrapped myself around. 

I thought to myself, “So this is growing up…”

I would lie there for several years. 

 

A boy came along.

He was lost in quite the opposite way. 

He stripped me, 

Left me more naked than a hairless body without clothes or love. 

I did not allow him to. 

I did not tell him to,

And I did not scream. 

 

They cloned me again, 

Sculpted me. 

This time into a puppet. 

The lost boy holding one string, 

My father, the other. 

I tried to run,

But the strings yanked me back.

Bruised knees, elbows, and twisted ankles.

Raw stomachs and infected scabs. 

Two fish hooks were inserted in each of my cheeks.

To what flesh was left for them to latch onto, I do not know,

For I was thinning. 

 

And then just as one would think, 

The hooks slipped through my broken skin. 

I was enslaved but unchained. 

More disoriented than I’d ever been. 

 

I met another boy. 

No he was not my savior,

Nor a perfect angel.

But he never tried to clone me.

He did not care that blood and guts were hanging from the veins of my eyes. 

He did not care that there were ghost prints of another’s hands around my neck. 

All he saw was the little girl in the titanium box. 

So, he handed me a drill.

I poked a hole in the box.

She breathed. 

I believe the youngest versions of ourselves are what we were always destined to be.

 

It would be a lie if they told you it happened in an instant,

 But there was a day,

And they could tell you I screamed.
I finally screamed as loud I possibly could. 

I purged.

I broke.
My father apologized.

I released. 

There are some things you can never change about a person.

There are some demons that I can never detangle from my ribs.

But it is the process of building your domino chain

That matters more than its tumble. 

And I know that sometimes its tumble will leave me silent. 

It will choke all the air out of me.

It will leave me scrambling in desperate need of clawing at my windpipes

To gather just a drop of oxygen. 

But i will continue to drill holes in the little girl’s box,

Raising my voice when my soul just needs to shout,

And I will rebuild and rebuild and rebuild my domino chains,

For we are all eternally growing up. 

 

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