21 May

Later formatted to prose in The Metaphysicist

~~~~~

Stripped of dignity,

we paint with crimson blood and cascading tears

smeared across canvases as broad as the institutions that kept us in tight locks,

in cells and in chambers

and in our own flaking minds

whose only deliverance is the knife of revenge

where finally the fluid chipped is not our own,

the carbon monoxide agony of twenty-seven airplanes buzzing chaotically

in freedom and in yelps,

one for each year we were imprisoned

and for the year that we became free,

sputtering in long awaited asphyxiation,

where the grave is the best location we can attain for matter destroyed by tantalizing objections

and taunting whispers of what could be

but what hasn't been for a while,

sculpting features into daggers to impress squares,

huffing paint in a back alleyway and hoping to be arrested because prison has better food than food for thought,

though we have been starving for a while

— starved of our confidence,

starved of our trust,

starved of nostalgic nights under blankets and peaceful misconceptions

in the burrows of Roanoke,

where our bedtime story was the shrieking of our sisters against trees

that slit their names into their mahogany wrists to force them to stay,

where morals stride unquenched through bustling city streets,

where our ears cloud over with soot to neglect the pleas of our mothers ordering us to wash the dishes left dirty from the mercurial age of thirteen,

pubescence clenched between teeth wracked in the standardized wires of conformity

who also conform solely by existing,

who serve as a role model imposed by idols creasing with each lie they fold under their skin to contemplate later,

but none of that pulls at us in quite the same way that the moon pulls at the tides,

for this is not born from control.

This is the rebellion we have created,

and this is our jailbreak after years of suppression.