Close your eyes

And think of a place.

Just one of all of the physical places

That take you to emotional places

Either putting a smile on all of our faces

Or turning us all into mental patients.

Feeling the scrapes and scratches

The bumps and bruises

The invisible scars imbedded into thick skulls giving us thick skin

These places our bodies have been,

Where our minds will never return.

For instance, a crowded movie theater.

Surrounded by souls

Disengaged bodies with minds wrapped around the silver screen

Ears blocked to everything but the surround sound

Surrounded by people who never heard a sound.

Not a muffle

Not a groan

Not a fast scream.

How about a locker room?

Steam licking metal lockers,

Sliding down rusty locks

This 6 foot by 6 foot box filled to the brim with hate

Insults raining down, sticking like flour on wet skin.

It’s behind these closed doors

There lies the key to every entry to the place we belong.

So we homeless souls wander the streets

Motherless children searching for another way.

No place to call our own

No closet to kneel down and pray to whatever god will hear us

So we shout out for help in a room full of people

We struggle to gasp out a cry or a screeching yell

And no one ever gave us a second glance.

Banging door to door, begging for someone to let us in.

To clean us up.

To mend our fractured hearts.

But no such door opened and we watched the party from the window

While we tied a splint around broken souls

Kept moving on blistered feet

Sometimes we crawled on scraped knees that no one kissed

And clawed at the ground with hands never held.

Us, children of the night

Bending over backwards for first place and always coming last.

And every time the moon greets us we make a list and check it twice

A list of all the gifts we never received

A list of all the reasons to go on.

Some of us couldn’t take it day by day

We went hour by hour and counted the minutes in red ink on sleeves

The countless door slammed in our faces.

And we made tallies of all of them.

But somewhere, somehow, the tide rolls out

The sun creeps behind the corner we were always told tomorrow was behind.

And we waited so long, we forgot we were at the end of the block.

When we finally face the chimera in our dreams

The monster in the closet

The fear in our eyes,

That’s when love came knocking

And gave us the keys to the kingdom we had been building all along.

We carved monuments of triumph with our feet scraping unfamiliar floors

We planted gardens over dreams that life starved dead

We filled beautiful fountains with the tears shed under the light of the moon

And it was all a work of art

The struggle of mankind

7 billion hearts looking with 14 billion eyes for someone to show them who they really are

And while we searched all our lives for that place where we belonged,

We were setting it in stone ourselves.