Layers | Teen Ink

Layers

December 18, 2018
By drahcir-swims GOLD, Highland Park, New Jersey
drahcir-swims GOLD, Highland Park, New Jersey
19 articles 6 photos 0 comments

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.


The author's comments:

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.


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