Like your heart dropped acid

And you know you're half broken; feels like your jutting ribs are cutting into you more every day. I don't have to watch your envy kick your pride in the balls. I don't have to listen as your enigma prevails in an argument with facts. A mind cast to the gallows, a Holocaust for your very own heart. You can roll those sunken eyes all you want, dearie.

Subtle at first. One smoke, two smoke, three smoke, four... And, karmic, no one ever questioned you about it as you had hoped, even though you had an answer for every cigarette. Overdoses and guns were too shocking; slitting wrists too much like a teenage girl. (Sometimes, I wonder if you forgot that's what you were.) Out-and-out suicide was wrong, you said, but it lost its sting if you strung it out over decades. All our old friends, the ones you started hanging out with again, the ones who quit smoking, they'll roll cigarettes for you. They love to roll cigarettes, and roll their earrings, and argue about anarchy. And you love them, and you love the cigarettes, the music, the sweat and patchouli, the panhandling, how their...your...minds always beat in straight time.

But you fell measures behind, and the music, the freight-hopping, the cigarettes, they mean nothing to you now. Everyone knows your beauty scars aren't from brambles or kittens, and that's the way you like it. You can only use that bleach as an excuse for hair caught in the drain for so long.

I'm listening to you recount your inner-battles, with all the vehemence of a wall flower, and I finally understand.

You just want to be beautifully fucked up. Or pretty, like your heart dropped acid.

poem by Claire Stuart
Added by Poetry Lover
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