If Only I Knew

Upon the mattress that weeps,

like the pus of a cut,

with the stench of antiseptic,

Held up by white metal stilts,

That wobble the bed

like a girl learning to wear heels

and an acne stricken plastic headboard;

There lies a body whose flat chest

Is stringed with tubes, and short hair

Matted to the surface of his scalp.

He is drained of oxygen,

as pale as the white stained walls

That coat over ghosts of blood and urine,

The same way a girl disguises her sacred face

With the paints for an unmistakable unnatural beauty.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Each wail of the exhausted EKG promised

That it wouldn’t.

Like an alarm set the night before,

That promised to overcome its

Politeness interrupt your sleep

So that you had a chance to defeat

the clock to be at school.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

I vomited a scream into the bowl of your ear,

Like the girl that purges the parts of herself

That reside in her gut to become

Her own savior from the imminent

Judgment of those that have

Already left scars.

But words are only for the living.

They hang in the air like your last breath,

As useless as the sacrifice of a girl for ‘perfection’.

Because it won’t bring you back.

And now,

I am as lonely as that girl,

Whose heart stopped with yours.

I only knew

Emptying the contents of my stomach

Into a bowl that had more of an identity

Than I did.

I only knew

The shoes with tilted sticks

To hold me higher than I

Ever felt, prop me up to be

Something I never

Could.

I only knew

The pigments that betrayed me

On my face, and the makeup that

Promised to mask it,

To conceal me.

I have learned

the bliss that ignorance provides.

I only knew too late

that you loved me

for my flawed perfection

when I could not love myself.

But, Death can only be

remembered by the living

So I pick out a woman’s dress in black,

Sow the hem up to fit my dead girl’s figure

Pull my hair back and let my blemished skin breathe.

The sky’s eye’s well with tears,

As I stand, a woman, hunched over the

Dirt that covers you.

With hands on my shoulder

Of those whose eyes criticize

The thickness of my waist.

When called upon,

By the man with the black book,

To say a few words-

Not enough to embody you-

All I could mouth at the silence was:

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”