Tag: fiction

Purposeful Violence

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My friends heard you know how frisky I get when I stand by a man like you.

There you are, punching holes in my paper walls after learning that we’re through.

No call backs though, no carton airplanes flying off this cliff I’ve put you on.

Six long months of miseries and resolving your twisted mind – do you even know

How much it hurts? I bet you don’t.

Never have I admitted to liking this game you’re lobbying but I read the rules –

A punch to the gut is a sign of love, a stab in the back is love times two.

Some days I wonder how I got that far, tearing myself up for a taste of passion –

The closest feeling to being cut in pieces with a hot knife and distributed

To everyone I hate in rations.

“Never trust a perfect person,” they say, but then ask you to stop being picky.

Apparently romance is only great if the ice is thin and each step is tricky.

Let’s be truthful – it’s all about how it seems, not how it feels, haven’t you noticed?

The worse your mental state gets with each fight, the more they cheer your passion

And give violence a purpose.

-JW

Fake Funny

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All they do is talk about fake happiness and how it kills the heart.

Are we still uncomfortable to hear that “fake funny” is the superior art?

The joke you let slide about your friend or a rude remark masked as “preference”…

And genuinely – all the funny remarks you make to avoid someone

Pointing out a painful existence.

Sometimes a laughing matter can be turned into a glass container

Hence you keep bottling up your emotions for the sake of a traitor –

Yet your brain will turn to mush to make it all sound like a choking hazard.

So many ears and eyes open to change of pace – but their truths

Remain stiff and plastered.

Another sarcastic comment underneath a discussion about double standards

Or how we’re going backwards too often.

But it’s not facts, it’s just the lack of manners.

The funnier the joke about these crowds, the pain, yourself, your own suffering,

The less you have to worry that anyone will start bothering

With questions that will cause stuttering.

Therefore, you hold onto the laughing matter instead of facing your lesions,

And people will judge you for the consequences, not for the reasons

Because you were the regent,

Not the victim, as per they trends from last seasons.

-JW

Black Hair Dye And Hospital Rooms

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Six stitches on my left thigh from the bruising your spite caused.

I bang my neck against the walls but they’re quiet, holding the applause.

No one notices my pleas for painkillers or your black hair dye fumes.

Trapped in a hospital room built out of hunger and imagined dooms.

“You’re not right,” I hear someone think through the yellow brick doors.

I squint but don’t lift my lids off the ground.

Must’ve been the corpse of my imagined flaws.

Six stitches on my scalp from the damage your faulty perception caused.

I claw out my hair but you ask to keep digging my nails with dirty paws –

No one sees as I fade away, begging for a way out, other than the window.

They dye my hair fiery red. I hear someone from the backstage cheer “bingo”.

-JW

Ten Small Town Commandments For Growing Up Convenient

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“Praise the leaders that weren’t a prey in somebody else’s tale,

Pray for the ladies who never made it out when society failed –

But that’s all you should do, just pray, keep your head down.

For God’s sake, don’t write this down, respect this (filthy) town!

And wasn’t it your mother who started this riot, you legal deviancy?

Look ahead, we’re going to pair you with someone we truly fancy.

Don’t mind the rebels screaming for freedom, it’s a charming farce.

You’ve written too many fantasy tales already, where’s the nurse?

See, lonely ladies like you are going straight to the judgement hearse.

Listen! Be natural, be enough, and don’t be a goddamn curse.”

-JW

Introduction To An Unreliable Narrator

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Did I promise to tell you the truth with all these lines

Or did I promise to lie until each of them rhymes?

I can’t hold an honest conversation about my pain

Not thinking it’s a competition that consumes my brain.

Yes, I’m sick, swallowed by the system and chewed up,

Looking like a normal product of society, maybe, somewhat.

My left foot chained to a curling iron thinning it out,

My right arm drained of its blood by panic and yesterday’s doubt.

But you might pass me in the street wondering how I’m so well –

And truthfully, no one but me could really tell

How a mess of a human presents that well on the front page

Or the Facebook feed of another lover I blocked with rage…

Did I promise to tell you the truth with these lines

Or did I promise to lie until each of them rhymes?

Whatever you heard – must be worth all the energy to get this far,

And if you believe that I’m being honest, you might have a heart.

-JW

The Origin Story

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One of those way too hot summer days but I’m trying to make it work.

Haven’t had a meal since Monday, yet I’m feeling they’re ready to lurk.

Putting my best foot forward on the dusty, forgotten town roads at north –

Not even five minutes in, a horde on my back breaking all the walls,

Even the fourth.

The sentences sneak up slowly, they’re there to capture and also – to kill.

Haven’t thought of myself this way. My blood runs cold, it stays still.

Every step I take gets heavier – or am I heavier now? Impossible to tell.

The darkest of thoughts thus far rush to my brain, and my eyes blink,

Ready to swell.

Shaking and scared to the core, I walk faster to avoid the burning heat

Of the words spoken so meanly, so categorically, and I know I don’t deserve

The right to breathe

Unless I’m good enough, tiny and form-fitting enough,

Plenty from all the sides and angles enough,

Enough, enough, enough.

Why wasn’t it enough?

Why did you have to say it out loud, would it make your parents proud?

Why did you chase me down like a hunter chases down its prey with a hound,

Hoping I won’t make a sound?

Because here I am eight years later writing this story,

Hopeful, enough and proud, wishing my father would call me

To also admit that, honestly, he’s been bathing in his own “sorry”,

And too blinded by the shine of gold, for the lack of a better allegory.

But on my worst days I’m still in that summer day eight years back, ready to go,

To disappear into nothing – if that’s more pleasing to strangers who I don’t even know.

Placing my best foot forward, keeping it together so tight it my break my heart altogether

But I guess it’s all a circumstance of the gruelling weather

And my thighs not being lighter than a fallen feather.

-JW

A Beautiful Day To Die

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The sun is playing on bare skinned people passing by, not reaching me yet.

I’ve become a mirror to the world’s worst battle cries, the symbol of debt.

Would be a lie if I claimed I’d rather touch the rays instead of reflecting –

It’s a beautiful day to die from overdosing on medals I’ve been collecting.

Never thought of myself as a warrior, cleaning up foreign messes, not my own,

Making sure as a foreigner I hide my own truths and give my illness a loan

To take out later, when I’m crumbling in the concrete walls of another city

Where windows are larger than life and privacy means you must be guilty.

All these second-hand “thank you” notes I’ve gathered now don’t mean a thing –

Loneliness carries itself just royally well until it finds a place to sting.

Then you’re down with the venom tearing your vision apart, installing mirrors.

You feel like it’s a beautiful day to die if you get to see the world any clearer.

But that was then – I continue to walk the streets with my growing reflective hopes.

I’ve become the mirror to the world’s battle cries but I’m no longer a ghost.

***

I shut the neon gates to my city.

The rebels are gone with the winds of fog colored in pity.

The small picture’s gone, replaced with only this memory

Of how I treated the streets I created as an enemy

I know I can’t reach my younger self but I’ll try through this revery:

Love, I hope you remember me.

-JW

New Chapter

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Blood on my trembling fingers from yesterday’s out of control rendezvous.

I don’t think I’m ready to ask questions with answers dipped in your blues.

It’s true, wanting everything from my past to be torn apart isn’t a solution

But I’ve waited too long for a happy ending, not another mediocre conclusion.

“I love you so much it pains me,” I say, looking at a gold framed mirror.

Bought this one myself in a vintage shop made for people-shaped errors.

Painted my walls white and took the hoarded neon to another graveyard –

I spilled my paint going there, then accidentally became the vanguard

Of some new, braver movement… Sorry, I can’t really recall their name.

They told me tales about the fame monster but I won’t listen to reason

When it comes to my shame.

So there’s still blood on my hands and I should admit – it’s probably mine.

Cutting your heart open becomes a hobby if you start practising when you’re nine.

Bleeding yourself dry daily for other’s mistakes feels OK, you’ve gotten better.

But I’m still unable to remember a time where I looked at myself

And didn’t feel dry or bitter.

May this mirror I’ve bought myself serve as a reminder of how I’m here, breathing,

And if I happen to bleed for my own life again, that’s because I’m leaning on myself,

The one person honest enough to drop her habit of being deceiving,

Instead of running for the hills, walking the walk through the delayed grieving.

May this mirror be the first thing to remind myself I am not perfect at it,

But I am healing.

-JW

A Dystopian Novel

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There are these full circle moments when the drums stop ringing in your ears,

The sound paralyzing your every move turns into a river washing out your fears.

But you can’t stand up, can’t raise a hand to greet the overwhelming sun

And the mountains seem golden, yet you’re careful about letting go of the gun.

There are moments where you reflect on deflecting your whole past and present,

The bass is penetrating your heart muscles because trauma isn’t pleasant.

Skull pulsating harder than a carnival stage filled with betrayed manic rebels.

Anxiety-driven you rush through the memories, climb brave through the levels.

There are moments where killing your mind with noise becomes a simple mischief,

But you pull that trick way too often so it grows into a cult, you bury it like a christian.

You might need a decade to ditch the part where attacking your senses feels fine.

The longer you ignore that pain, the more likely you’ll turn it into a dystopian novel

with rhymes,

like mine.

-JW

When I Was Younger

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And I look at my layered cotton candy sky every evening

Blaming my father for distorted love that keeps bleeding.

I’m doing alright, more than I was promised where I grew up

In the town where no one’s allowed to stand up

For themselves or for anything somewhat decent…

I can’t shake the spite because it feels so recent,

Because their cotton candy sky’s inherited and not really earned.

Where I come from, each cry for love remains spurned.

The hate is a currency there – but so is the hidden insecurities.

Dirty beings blowing mud on the clouds, judging all purities.

And I look at my pink sky because I clawed my way up here,

Away… but the town behind refuses to fade out and disappear.

I know that my head on a stick will not suffice their hunger.

Wish I had known when I was still hopeful, when I was younger.

-JW