Painted Skin

My garbled news congests online highways.

crashes with people I never see,

contact through fragmented ideas

and a thoughtless day’s details.

it’s almost like we’re there together

but then again it’s not like that at all.

I type a sad reminder

As breathy blunders crawl around me.

Buried heads show themselves,

kept safe in sludge.

And when I’m at my computer buzzing

A cotton headed reef hangs over me.

I stare at the screen telling me who I am.

My profile picture shows me at a party

I am obscured in photograph,

face slumped in shadows

while my nose bleeds yellow from the light of a lamp.

Body tarnished with dashing colors

Scared blues flicker on my eyelids

They smudge my serious glimpse.

It’s late here, the party has caught my glow.

I look like an orchid, strange and beautiful and like someone else.

someone might only know this orchid

they might think it’s me.

But this is the fallen logo of a woman.

Milk mashed face poured onto a screen

Humming a song of electric nothing.

Is this what they all want to see?

Maybe you, maybe you

I know you could love me through this mesh.

I thought maybe you might like me this way

static and soundless,

but I always look good.

there are places where I always look the same.

My proof to the world

is this softly woven image

it carries bruised memories,

Tangles them together,

but I am more than these images show, I am less.

I am sitting here real,

the internet disguises shyness so well.

My damp worried skin

Wrinkled fingers, broken clothes, all of it

Sturdy without self sifting.

My hair like polluted water.

I wake up with bugs,

Fall asleep with blood stained sheets,

Dream of wild things,

Dance with girls I shouldn’t touch.

they say only my bones make an impression.

I’m not the swan I portray.

I am dirty.

I stand up crooked.

Without these illusive images,

I impress my mazed mind

with drapery carved around my frame.

My clothes still help to show what I can’t always say

Clothes keep me buried,

I am the same illusion,

I have my own way of being who I wanna be.

We give the world an image of ourselves that we design.

gathering and glowing in different places

We filter our skin because the world doesn’t protect us.