Humble wounds beneath my skin, brush my veins and it hurts to hold them,
Sealed beneath a brown-pink tint as dark as dusk, a fleshy camouflage.
Devoid of language, there exists no frame to encapsulate the paragraphs I could speak
To splurge out of me the painstaking burn that crisped my heart to a hearth.
Sometimes bobbing like rose petals on a sea of blood, what a magnificent identity
And sometimes hellish angels streaming through my slippery skin, yet finding the friction to prick me at my every recall.
Scratch upon scratch, skin red then pale, itches that don’t forgive nor forget
And nor do I forget, the few moments that distractions send me shards of bliss
But even those seconds are slivers of time, and I slip back into unarmoured battle.
It seems I was too restless, that once someone asked of my erratic ailment
But I could not shed light upon a shadow, that itself survived in the dark depths of my conscious
A wound that silently scattered flashes of emotion, monstrous vibrations thrusting in my limbs
Yet outside, an artificial organisation to my movements, mundane but mechanical.
No respite, no solution, no cure, my gashes feed on their unholy imperceptibility,
They ooze not blood, but tears I could not manufacture at memories I have flushed,
Whispers I was not meant to hear, familiar scents I wish had disappeared,
Voices I interrogated violently thrashing my eardrums, textures I gripped in desperate, moist palms,
Hugs of laughter, kisses of reunion, hands of holding, hands of scolding, fingers intertwined, fingers of blame.
Now I wince and make room, for new cracks to blister, and old open valleys to scab, for my fractures to leisurely derail me hollow
My bones are not brittle but abrade to be polished, far from broken, only mildly tested of their human strength
I am my fractures, my fractures are us, and without fractures, how imperfect are we.