Wars End When Wars Do

Ghost Children

There are moments

Bad and hard to comprehend, mismatched;

I do not know how to 

String together an entire good life

Or a person

Out of so many broken things.

What I mean is 

The Cat gets pissed

And he yells

He’ll smash the Dog’s skull

And there is so much rage in his body.

I do not know

How to tell the men 

This fury is not something to be proud of,

To carry or pass on.

There are children who have shrunk themselves 

And swallowed their own being

To fit into houses filled with so much rage:

Children who are too loud or too dumb,

Children who will never be enough,

There is no time;

Children who would rather 

Sleep on the streets

Than be here.

Children who cut out parts of themselves,

Make themselves smaller, be appropriate,

To belong here.

Children who rebel,

Grow tired of waiting, grow weary;

Grow up

And then cry for their mothers,

Gulp their own tears.

Children sitting on floors

Of good houses

And full families

And have never been more alone,

More annoyed at themselves

For not seeing all the good,

For noticing the wreckage,

For not smiling through their own slaughter.

Children who move out 

And do things they weren’t sure 

They wanted in the first place.

The Cat screams and scratches everyone

Trying to help him,

The Hamster yells of how her life was ruined;

The Parrot bites me, claws at the Cat and 

Keeps breaking things, so many things,

Screams of his entrapment.

I am small:

A rat in a big world,

    I have never been alone.

Love Birds (but like the Love is real and pure)

Fell in love with a stranger for a few moments today.

mother of otherness, eat me.

(Sylvia Plath)

There are things we do not talk about here.

Do not mention the lines that once

Ran along the length of your left hand,

Carved by you trying to play God

When you were barely a person//

Perhaps that was the point.

Half a year trying to make the scars disappear,

The other half spent convincing your own damn self not to.

Listen.

There are places in your head

You could disappear off to,

The ones which will make you so, so happy

And perhaps even a maniac,

But aren't maniacs just people

With enough conviction

To want to live in a world

That was their own mind's doing?

I am proud.

When the Earth tumulted and collapsed on me,

Trying to throw me off itself,

I held on with bare hands.

I dug my claws into the brown soil,

Trying to become one with the Mother,

Trying to grow myself some roots to stay.

I have already been here longer than I had imagined,

To have a place at all is magic in itself.

I have so much life left to grow roots out of.

We kissed and fought wars

With our tongues,

You seemed to taste an awful lot

Like the lull after a bomb;

The quiet after the storm

When there is nothing more left

To break apart, nothing more left

To get undone.

We tore limbs and rearranged parts

Of our own selves-

Like the Jenga tiles

We never seemed

To arrange right.

We crumbled there on your bed,

And never could hold each other again,

Could never hold our own selves again.

One life people. Only one. Fucking run for it! Learn that goddamn language, read that book, draw shittily, sing off key and break some goddamn glasses. Fuck this illusion of perfection. We are here to goddamn live. Every art becomes less shitty as you work on it. Same with your life, it's all art babies. Work and get it y'all! Okay bye.

You held me close before you stabbed me.

I guess there are people close by

Who keep you at a sword's length

So they get to use it.

Your kisses tasted an awful lot like war

And I will not be your white flag anymore.

Our fights felt like the earth shaking,

Felt like war cry;

The silence felt like an interstice between two tragedies.

Our kisses grew shorter

And interruptions became devastating

Until you finally struck and won the battle,

Won the war.

There's blood between us now

And one tragedy in all of this silence//

It has been a year since we last talked.