Another overly long poem defining myself as nothing.

art by Brittany Markert

This is sort of two poems haphazardly slapped together, but both of them seem to deal with childhood in one way or another, I think. I can’t really determine where one ends and the other begins, it all got jumbled up and edited and shuffled around with no real direction in mind other than trying to structure it in a way that makes some sort of sense. Obviously, I failed at that. But I have to move on. I wish I could sleep for months.

Birthed Wrong

Magnifer clicks on the shameful spotlight

Atom bomb falling out

Awkwardly from my unrecognizable picture frame

While I try and fail to sleep

Hooks distending my smile

Land on the floor with a screeching series of cracks 

Carrying little bits of my bloodied gums

Singing sweet songs of

Crushing indifference

Series of black and white exposures 

Bleeds into little voids

Pockmarked in my skull 

Unwanted ugly past unfolds;

L-shaped school desk

Reforms with grease-paint and spoiled acrylic,

Shifting, murky visage of teachers

Yelling their sardonic grins off waxen faces,

Echo against chain-link walls,

Clock-tick exposed jutting spikes 

Unwrapped broken appendages 

Still embedded in chalk-covered blacktop 

Impaled children’s organs 

Hollowed out as decorations 

Their throats cut with deafening, desperate sounds

Of wailing gusts of wind.

But they still cling to memories of untapped lunacy

And sing in radical daydreams

Taking shape above their shining little heads

Porcelain and expressionless

Effortlessly resilient 

Making mockery of looming school teachers 

Who can bludgeon and burn 

But can not truly touch them. 

I don’t recognize ever being that age,

There’s no connection 

I wasn’t supposed to live this long,

My child-self is an overblown ghastly entity 

Maliciously surviving into 

An avalanche of mental turmoil. 

Pierrot cosmetics drip 

In heavy walls of rain,

Time drained of meaning 

Monochrome and shadows 

Consume the classroom,

Their leering faces slip off one by one

Exposing gnashing, blackened teeth,

Maliciously hungry grins 

In one encapsulating endless moment,

The attrition of our lives catches up

We become undone as little carnival nothings

Pastel-painted nobodies

Smearing our failed human faces

Across deserts of stretched gray canvas,

I do not understand.

Defined by faded madness,

The lightless caverns of our teachers’

Star-shaped, exploded eyes,

A corrupted, manipulated guidance,

Spiders out with static and smashed pelvic bones

Out of their mouths

And into our undeveloped, crucified minds.

There is no you 

There is no me. 

-

Classroom of beautiful deformities

Left dreaming

Underneath the monochromatic 

Final sunset

Vacuum of sounds 

And kaleidoscopic parade of polaroids

Mold me, unwantedly, further back 

Into the rejected form 

Of my childhood. 

Did it start in this staged photograph?

Shining ancestral masks cast 

Looking down with generational atrophy

Do they see me

With their dead doll eyes? 

In and among the grand embryonic forest,

Accursed gavities dug into menstrual soil,

I am lost 

As the unwanted dead flora

Left over from the great decaying womb,

The erased sketches of Patient Zero

Moss-covered DNA tendrils coil around

My existential unrest 

Shivering up my crooked spine, 

Notches of reeking cacoons

Powdered with dried, discolored afterbirth,

Pulsates into stinging, itching rust

Everyone’s either intangible drifting ghosts,

Trapped in my torturous dreams 

Or simply

Gone. 

But I need someone here

To suck the disease out of my veins. 

I hate this form

I hate what I’ve been born into, 

I’m alone in it all,

Sneering, jesting parents 

Molding me into a weapon of personalized hate.

I was made to rage and tear against them both

And lose myself in the guilt and festering

Of self-imposed isolation. 

Who am I? 

The only thing I have in common with my father

Is a diagnosis.

My mother routinely poisoned herself 

In the undulating primordial soil

A chemical redefinition,

Long before my regretful creation.

I’ve adopted the addiction 

For confused self-loathing

And an inescapable belief 

That I am alone in my hideous syndrome 

Of the walking dead.

Take me away.

There’s no other explanation,

I was born to be

Less.

-