_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.

angel.

She has eyes the colour of raindrops.
Violin strings for vocal chords
And a laugh like sunlight fighting through thunderclouds.
A smile like lightning
And a heart well worn on frayed sleeves.
She treats her past the way an alcoholic treats an empty bottle
And there’s nothing left
Because she spends all of her time trying to earn her wings back.

So I’m trying to paint a picture out of jigsaw pieces
Searching for her reflection in stained glass windows
To try and understand her.
Why she keeps herself locked away
Like Rapunzel with long locks of regrets
Hanging heavy from her eyes
Wondering if the burden
Ever becomes too much for her cheeks.
Because she wears her sadness
The way most girls wear their skin.

Then one day she confessed her mistakes.
She said she was wrong for thinking he was perfect.
He who made her believe she could fly.
And the first man to tell her she was beautiful.
Until the day he got tired of her.
Snatched her hopes away
And sent her down to me with tears on her face
And a broken halo.
Her paper mache wings fighting to lift her up.
I think I’m praying to a broken angel.

She doesn’t remember what it was like
To have God as a neighbour
And treats joy like a friend
That packed all their memories in the back of a truck and left.
She tells me heaven is a lot more golden from the other side.
And down the block,
You might be able to get your fix for salvation
If the darkness didn’t swallow you first.
So she looked for rainbows…
A reassurance that the rain might give birth to music.
That nothing was ever as bad as it seemed
And baptized herself in nothing but daydreams.

Now I’m locked in her eyes
In a gaze like confessionals in the backseat of a car
And all her secrets gift-wrapped and addressed to her grave.
But I swear…that the first smile she ever threw in my direction
Must have felt a lot like heaven.

Every time I try to tell her
She loses control
And her lips quiver and spasm under the weight of tears
Heavier than concrete and hotter than lava
Hurricane Katrina in a whisper
Like my words were prayers being poured over her
Like an exorcism for all the demons she was left with.
And the rainbows she used to look for
Stopped reassuring her that everything was going to be fine
And turned into ashes of Armageddon in the sky.
A thunderstorm of disappointment
And a broken hearted symphony
Exploding with such force that it knocked God off his pedestal.

And all I’m asking for now is a miracle.
To bring her back to life
So her wings can carry her back across that horizon
Then I can stop praying to that broken angel.
See…
She has eyes the colour of raindrops.
Violin strings for vocal chords
And a laugh like sunlight fighting through thunderclouds.
And it’s been way too long since the last time I’ve heard it.
Forgetting that sometimes...
I used to think it that the angels were singing to me.