Roughnight

Please stop telling me you hate me.
Everything you ever did, and now will never do; turns your head away from mine in disgust.

Today at $14 an hour, all I can manage to keep me standing is protein in shapes. No plates of cake on my bookshelf this morning. Spent the evening feeling Absinthe stories play behind my eyes and grass under my knees, strong arms of boys I knew, now men, strung across my back and shoulders. All the vines you ever compared me to, I feel more like a weed now. Something dirty you can pull out but covered in spikes so it doesn’t even feel the skin of someone elses touch. These men pierced their hands with the thorns I find my figure dotted with.

Lighting candles in the dark, with the wind turning my hair into tendrils.

And so I’m hurting everyone else.

But it is for your own well being. Because I can’t even make conversation. Or keep my eyes on what’s at hand.

And you can’t make me feel bad about that. I’m sorry, but I am free to distinguish anyone I please from the furnace that I keep going on a daily basis. Showing your true colours, reminding me of my mother.

And someone else: I, again, let myself be repeatedly vomited on. So I’m licking my fingers and touching them to a wick.

I can’t even keep my eyes alert for more than thirty seconds.
How could you expect me to care for anyone else, when I care so little for myself.

TN