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Layers
When they ask you why
You’re socially awkward,
You want to say
I was not like this
When the sun rudely barged into my room
This morning at seven
Without knocking.
You want to say
I stood in front of my mirror
And used a cookie cutter
To carve a smile onto my face
The cold metal
Jabbing cruelly at my mind
Who was still wallowing in yesterday’s dreams.
You want to say
I ripped out my heart
With bloody and trembling hands
Emotions still seeping from the dangling veins and arteries
And stuffed a steel box into the gaping hole
Listening to the emptiness clanging off of the bare metal walls.
You want to say
I taped crutches
To my drowsy eyelids
So that they wouldn’t collapse
In the middle of class
And send me off to Hypnos’s emergency room.
You want to say
I used an ostrich feather duster
Silently shaking with the animal’s pain
To brush off the depression coating
My slumped shoulders
Because I know y’all are allergic.
You want to say
I donned a knight’s helmet
Reeking with the stench of Death
To ward off the poisonous arrows
That would surely fly in my direction
At school
Because introverts are merely custom-made
Laughing stock.
You want to say
I wrapped myself in yellowed linen
Removed
All the organs within my body
That were stamped with the seal of Life
And put them on my dressing table in a clay jar.
Thus I became the mummies in the British Museum
Mute, lifeless, exhibited, and continents away
From where I belonged
In the deserts of solitude.
You want to say
Not all who are silent cannot speak
Because beneath all these layers
I am shouting
But slowly drowning
In the echoes.
But instead you smile
Hoping no one notices
The grimace inside.
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For those who are too timid for fear of being judged, for those who are hurt and hide their pain, for those who are too often ignored and overlooked—this poem is for you. Let yourself be heard.