To hell with what cinema says,

Nobody wants pieces and shards and

Broken glass is intimidating

And a waste of time.

 

You get your hands dirty and cut

And nobody wants to make their

Lives harder than it already is.

 

No one wants to embrace shards of the windshield

That shattered in a wreck that no one can explain to you.

Nobody wants to fix me.

 

No one wants the half blind, half snarling, half whimpering

Creature in the back of its cage

When you're looking for a sweet thing to cuddle.

You know that its been hit and starved

But that you are not the one that will fix it,

Maybe it's beyond that already.

 

This marble column broke and

No one is looking for rubble.

No one worth a shit is wandering

Psych wards looking for beauty

Or love or for me.

Because there is no girl, interrupted.

The heart that thrashes against its rib cage is not interrupted;

And she is hardly quieted.

Her pills are given to her softly and hesitantly,

With words of sympathy and lies

From nurses that don’t want to be there.

 

Pain does not glitter in my eyes

Like a twinkle of sacred knowledge.

There is no spark of excitement on my face.

I am dull and sunbleached

Like an abandoned car in a ditch

That keeps getting passed by;

People remembering the blown out roof

and the broken glass.

It’s full of rot and rust and burrowing creatures.

There is no more soft twinking in my features.

 

I have been star crossed with attrition

And I have been sallow and pale

And I was not lovely or comely or elegant

My flesh was dried out from sweating and wailing

And I smelled like chlorine from trying in vain

To strip myself of my skin

To peel it off like an orange rind and

Escape from everything that hurt

And that I couldn’t describe.

 

So don't tell me that we build upon pain

Because it is turpentine to the soul.

All my original pieces were shattered and stolen

And I have parts that will never be whole.

And I don’t even have the sauter

To make a stained glass window.

 

Crying pretty is a myth

If I weep then I scream and the

Mask of mascara, there to hide what's inside,

Melts and washes away.

It is wailing catharsis

That I could never seem to find;

It is blubbering after the sex and self destruction

That I thought would finally burn me down

To soot so that I might rest

In Ashes on the mantle in my childhood home.

 

I am not beautiful the way that

Victory

Is is not beautiful

It is blood and fire and coming home

to never be the same.

It is abandoned battlefields

And swallowing hard, all the fights that you lost.

It’s the constant smell of the napalm you ran from

And the people you had to leave behind.

 

I am beautiful the way you

Climb out of your own coffin and

screaming that you deserve better.

Telling the only people at your wake,

Your favorite uncle and your mother,

To cease their whisky-lament;

To wait for me because I think I’ve earned a drink.

 

I am not beautiful.

I am a newly born star;

Reaped of collapse and original death.

I am littered with soil from clawing out of the ground.

 

I pulled myself from destruction.

And the knees that I skinned

From crawling when I was too weak to stand

Is gold leaf upon my flesh.

 

These scars are electricity and I am beyond being pretty

I restrung my veins and rewrote my bones

And I used iron and rock salt

I fixed myself because no one wanted to

And no else could

Aphrodite was demolished and I built Athena from the dust

 

I ugly cried for three years

Till I got fucking tired

Of waiting and wailing and wallowing

Of making myself sick over everybody I pretended to love

Of raging against my lungs and raging against sleep

I got fucking tired

Because there is no more room for self pity

Fuck pretty.