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The sallow burns I rescued in a jar talk to my sickly mind like midnight anxieties. It had disheveled my sanity and rendered the world wanting salvation. Yet, I do not feel it. I cannot yearn for something invisible yet so near and beating and mourning. I do not know where to place my torch and light up a way to breathe. Barefoot on an endless tragedy, I am engulfed in an ember flame like a severed occurrence. I was handed destruction from the crimson mists of what the earth called light. And it embraces me like kin, for about seconds and months, as if it is never-ending. As if I won't look around anymore in the dark, seeking the same shattering imagery that took me off my skin.
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“I need a father, I need a mother, I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God but the sky is empty.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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Hues talk to my traces as they pluck the stems out of my heart—defiling passion and altering wrath to unimaginable spaces of my sanity. I come forth as a lost soul with chills in my calloused consciousness. I will fail to exhale. My mind is bound to corruption as if I have surpassed the trials of holiness. I will be a withering mask no one sees within my limbs and flesh. It is when I carve false god on my pulse and make a rain of my fears. I will become with the darkness and it'll devour my senses like a coveting spine. There's something addictive from leftover stings pulsing from beneath my skin. My consciousness is bred with blood and glee that it itches every bone and life engraved in this body. I no longer perceive what pain feels from a cold limb.
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But deep in my crumpled gut is a threatening question—I am in a haze of reality and dream, agony and comfort, purity and dirt, sins and masked divinity but why am I bathed from river blood instead of an unscathed estuary? We call to the gods for help and clearance and seek purpose to brutality and unnecessary violence but I hear a familiar whimper. As if a new suffering has descended from the heavens to keep my mind off primordial ones. The boundless nightmares I so long to bury unearthed themselves.
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For once, it was maddening until I couldn't figure out the rest. There is nothing holy and sacred from the ceiling of graces I have whispered my prayers unto. No deity to call upon my fate but a god from which exist down the roots of my decayed sanity. A boggle of some sort. When I am torn apart and bits of tragedy, do I think of a mighty being that could undo what I have become? Or perhaps pray to the nuns that I am alive and telling tales. With chances of redemption. With a purpose-seeking soul that may rise upon me.
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All I possess are my filthy parts—screaming pity and hopelessness. What are these poorly flooded tears? Have I failed to grasp the life given to me? All of me and the absurd half of what I have to live for is coaxed with lies from someone else's flesh. I gobbled black holes under my tongue but forcefully without a blink of suspicion even in the failure of opening my mouth. They had shut my existence long before I learned to speak. And they feed my insides with terrible graces they serve—the elders call them curses from ancient times. I have only owned thousands of unsaid thoughts, crawling down my throat like a sickly beast. But they tell me I lack sleep. I need not console in any form because I am born with the sacredness of life as any purified soul must be. Crying and anger is a sin, child. They must tell you, you're like no other—ruined but you still breathe. You're dwindling a burning morass but it's nature. Perhaps, I'll be swallowed whole and they would still come knocking by my door for breakfast.
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But I had no one to share my wounds with. I had no one to question another trauma entity as if a world deserted. And I am only tragic with a lifeless mind that burns my blood—like a classic heard from afar while I am so gone in my head. I have atoned for my sins through desperation and revival yet I still fear. I still cling to the guilt placed within the anxious corners of my brain and I'm angered but I cry. I am utterly bare without bones on the ground yet there is rage. I sing the gospels and pray for miracles. I have turned myself in to seek forgiveness from the profanities engulfed in my mind. Others have wished for grandeur and they have had it. I own a sole dream anyone would desire to keep in their graves, why couldn't I have it? Why must I be the unfated child that no one dares to ask about?
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If I talk now and cry a river for honesty, what holy could miraculously heal me?
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I am not certain to say how this could be a chance of going back on track. I have long discarded these words in the basement and I cannot write anything else for months. But I am digging them up once again to make something matter. I came to this scribble every once in a while to edit out unpleasantries and things related to me being ruthless towards what I can only do at the moment. And I am only able to half-function when I am faced with a writing prompt that ruins my mind at first read. I extend my thanks to you who have read it until here.
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