_razorblade stanzas.

Have you ever seen a razorblade
Swivel its hips across an ivory dance floor?
Waltzing across bare skin with steel stilettos
Leaving bloody passion and pain
Blazing across the floorboards.
Humming to the melancholy of her family’s neglect,
Her friends’ goodbyes,
And the somber soundtrack of burning bridges
Right until the music stops.

Her heartbeat.
Bumping a bass line rhythm
For the dancers to lose themselves in
Marching in file down her wrists
Like a barcode of all the memories
She wishes she could buy back.

Hands and feet shackled to better days
But the silver lining’s auctioning off the rest of her
To a father that sees the bottom of a shot glass
More often than his family
With a fist that falls like comets
And paints her face the same hue as the night sky

A mother reborn as a renaissance of a woman
But the only role she ever gets to play now is “victim”
Lips stitched together in gun-cocked silencers
That never betray the burdens
That her tears point fingers at.

And a brother that used to be
The only good thing she ever had.
Until she came home from school
And found him hanging in his bedroom.
The trauma screaming from the walls
Witnessing her brother turn into a statistic.
She misses him.
And sometimes she wishes that it would all end
Just so she could say hi again.
Like life…is just a race
And the winners only sprint their hardest
To get away from what’s behind them.

So she cuts herself another slice of heaven.
Because in this whirlwind of a world
That swirls crazy in her veins
It’s the only thing she can control.
Baptizes herself with her pain.
Blesses herself with the blame.
Slicing her skin, scorching
Across the meadows of her arms
Like burning crosses
Asking God to admit all the mistakes He ever made.

An inhale of fresh air
From the darkness so thick, she thought
That she would suffocate
Back breaking under the pressure
Of carrying a building bricked from all her regrets
60 sob stories high and wide as the night sky.
Singing a lullaby to her heart
That replays like shattering glass
In the crook of her smile and the breaks in her laugh
That she wields like a mourning star.

So how do you tell a broken woman she’s beautiful?

You give her roses.
Not blaming her for having thorns
But thanking the thorn bush
For giving you something beautiful
That pricks your skin just hard enough
To help you understand her.