Sometimes I hold my head in my hands and sink into the sheets

teeth in a soft lip turned chapped

too much pushing on me from all sides

from nowhere

the faceless voices tell me that there's nothing to be afraid of

that it isn't real

but real is what you decide it is

and when you're breaking down

and cracking up

it's easy to pretend you're fragile or strong

balancing on a frozen moment where the coin is at its peak in flipping

you scratch your arm and feel the skin stripping away with your soul

bark on a tree uprooted from the soil by the storm

and you smile a grimace in that moment you cry

tears streaming down your face in a warmly burning line

tell everyone you know that things "will be alright"

the one and only lie you're ever gonna tell

with the honest smile the one phrase that you whisper to sing yourself to sleep

while the stitches are screaming "beauty is only skin deep"

and sunlight fades faster than beauty fades faster than skin fades faster than any tattoo

when the night rises in the sky you flip through the magazines looking up to the stars that gave you all the false standards that you hold yourself to, while the scars on your wrist that match the scars on their tits

both from trying to make yourselves fake for everyone that keeps telling you that you are a mistake, and there's nothing left to make the world make sense

yet you know that it wasn't the right thing, and the knowledge of it burns deep and red and slow inside you, an ember half extinguished in the blood of your anguish, pooling inside your soul and looking out of your eyes, half closed, circles drawn dark with eyeliner like magic marker and tears on a page streaming down your face you cry out loud

 

Things will be alright you scream into the night and the fire and light will never change the way you fight the scars and the shards of your broken heart jut out of your chest, you wear a vest made of shrapnel, nobody will touch you from this far away because you weren't made to fight, you can barely handle this battle; and anyone could see it on your face if they bothered to look that pain is the closest friend that ever held you to its breast while you bled out on that battlefield inside your head

they told you you were crazy

that youre overthinking it

that you were wrong

that it's a lie

 

and they ignore the way your head turns away from them when you sleep,

how you clutch your chest in a fetal position, like your heart needs to be nursed back to health in your hands, how nothing will make you better when they say that it can. They ignore how you say goodbye and hello with a voice made hollow by the part of you trying to reach out again and again and again, getting crushed again and again and again when they don't respond and make you more vulnerable and dangerous.

 

You've become a soldier fighting a losing war

mind laced up with scratches and scars

every cell screams loud enough to rattle the bars of its cage in pain

but you shut your eyes and whisper the same refrain to yourself every single night

because somehow you know

Things will be alright