Damaged Face Girl

Everybody said they didn't know her,
When she walked with her head down through the hall,
Nobody spoke to her because of her stutter and her slur,
They didn't pick up her books when they decided to fall,
As if those books were pin pulled grenades,
To burn all their faces just like hers,
The scars of her third degree past on her face never seemed to fade,
So she kept her head down and walked through life in a blur,
For nobody wanted to look into the damaged girl's face,
Not even knowing it was more than her skin that was hurt,
For she lived in her father's abusive place,
Where he hurt her till she thought she was as black as dirt,
Everybody said they didn't know her,
Until she pulled out the metal that was black as dirt,
And once her public quit on life created a stir,
The others were finally alert,
Everybody said I knew her,
I never said a harsh word or pushed her down the stairs,
But all it took was ignoring her they concurred,
And never show how much they really did care,
To make the damaged girl's face bleed from her own hands,
When they gave her the "damaged face girl" brand.

-anna sluder




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair to reach the clock high above me, so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with a pair of gardening scissors. But I hear a knock at the door and it is present standing in the way holding a fish, she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it, she tells me she knows that everything the birds say really matters to me that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release, in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed, but that I could not remember my first cold water, there was no recollection of my first bright moon. She tells me to hold the fish and decide what it means to me in terms of love, so that I will remember when I leave this room, and when I go to sleep, that I once loved something new, and small, and grey, and something that had scales and looked nothing like me, and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there, but that that di
Read more

Green

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,
Read more

The Only Future I See

I am afraid to make today my home, I am afraid to buy pillows in the comfort of this moment, so I try to imagine the future, I like to think that it is a road lined with flowers in the colors of my youth, but there are no flowers, I don’t even think that if there is a road, it is lined with commas. When I dare my mind to try to imagine the future, I only see myself, no bills, no house, no job, no person, no plan, just myself standing in a field of baby green ampersands, cutting my hair and then holding a small bird, and the bird doesn’t sing for me,  as I promised I would never ask it to, it just stays alive beside me. So most days we break apart plums with our fingers like stories, and we make each day, each plum our home, and we are perfect and we are whole in this interval of quiet, where the sun is the only one who gets to see. -anna sluder
Read more