my mind is a half-formed thing.

tonight i will be someone else.
i’m so broken, my resentment has creased deeply on my forehead and around my mouth. i could swear i can feel it on the bridge of my nose.
i'm going to pray tonight because i don’t know what else to do.

i’ll swat flies out of my hair and cover it, brush my decayed teeth and fall hard in my knees.
and after years of praying i will grow to know that god will never remove that resentment inside of me, i will know that my cruelty is hereditary. and unlike everyone around me who’s only around me until one of us dies, i’ll live with it forever.

when i come back home from work i’ll paint my skin like white walls, stack my organs same way i trap my people, same way i organize books on my shelf i’ll sleep on them, on myself.
and because i bleed like no one else, no one, not even i, can see my exit wounds. all these people are bleeding crimson, but when i was hurt for the very first time, i watched myself bleed black frothy poison and i lived my entire life trying to convince myself that i deserved to bleed. and in a way, that pain felt religious.

so i’ve tried to write poems instead, because i’m tired and the insides of my mouth is heavy with venom and bilious, and my life is thin as a thread and even though mother said that god is a god of mercy he accepts prayers from the well and the sick we both know that there’s something about me that makes it hard for things to simply work for me. so i wrote obsessively about my life, like peeling oranges neatly, separating sections cleanly; yellow heavenly light in the corner of my sacred room, and flowers bedded in the crown of my head, i beautified the ugly corners of my empty room and filled in the empty gaps of my walls with flowery verses. and it was enough. but i cant stop writing about deaths, ugly gory poems that will make no sense. a thief stealing poets' words and turning them into my own poison. a failed fraud.

the world is mourning summer and spring and im here in a country that doesn’t go through the seasons, im always on the other side of bluntness. always saved. everything around me says i should be a ruthless man.
grinding my teeth, throwing words like ricochets, i sleep through my alarms, hazy and uncertain. mumbling to myself in my sleep: this is how you’re going  to die, disarmed and spiteful, white foam coming out of your filthy mouth, you’re ugly inside out.

but you already knew that; you learned it from your mother, saw it in strangers' eyes. you cried about it for more than half of your life until it wasn’t sad anymore.