poetry

Bitter

I stand alone in the center of a great
barren plane, plain, somewhere - I don’t care
I don’t know which is more desolate:
this scorched earth I stand amidst, a victim
of some napalm-like death, stark naked and
screaming to get away from her own skin and the
burning, captured in an image by some
photographer who went home a week later and
won a prize for his beautiful photograph;

I ran across this burnt wasteland desperately
clawing at my clothes until they are left in a
burning heap: the artificial masks and shields and
disguises of a thousand lives I once led and I
tear at my skin, not knowing where the layers of
burning stop, only wanting the pain to end; not seeing
the blood on my hands that is mine from ripping my
searing flesh down to the bone, leaving me only a
skeleton vainly scraping away at the bones to make
this nightmare stop

Or this loneliness I keep myself in as I fearfully
turn away every genuine hand that wants to touch me,
in terror that this burning will infect them too,
only to turn and run towards the photographer who
couldn’t possibly care less and is probably some
closet pedophile and that’s why he is taking pictures
of we naked, burning, screaming, running children coming
towards him in the first god-damned place