Frankenstein

I am constantly frustrated with myself --
with my own inability to string words together
in the proper order, at the proper moment.

I am "shy". I am "introverted".
No, I am loud. I am screaming,
but at a frequency that it seems only I can hear.

I can't translate my thoughts into words.
It's like trying to speak a foreign language,
with all the slippery subtleties they never taught you in school.

I very rarely say the right thing,
and so I say nothing at all,
frightened by my failures into a submissive silence.

I feel like a monster, like Frankenstein
made me a perfectly passable shell of a man,
but could not perfect that which would make me human.

Insidious

It's the poison in my memories
that I can't seem to shake;
the venom that will kill me,
even though I've killed the snake.

Pockmarks

Three months later and I still hear your voice in my sleep.
Subconsciously, I still catalog the parts of my day
that might have made you smile.
My thoughts are wallpapered with images of us
and I can't bring myself to paint over it,
not even the parts that are peeling.

When I met you, I was not whole -
I was half-formed and new and still slick with slip.
You made finger prints in my sides and cast me into the fire,
and I emerged with those marks baked into my skin.
"No one will ever love you like I do," you said,
and I believed you.

When you left, I tried to fill them with other things,
other people. Nothing fit, but I kept at it.
They felt so empty, like tiny black holes.
I'd run my hands over them when I felt most alone,
and I'd hug my knees and think of you.

I still touch them often, I think to remind myself
that you held me once, and what your hands felt like.
My fingers don't fit very well, but they fill some
of the space you left.

I don't have to fill these holes -
they are as much a part of me as anything else.
They do not make me incomplete or any lesser.
I have loved and I have lost,
and I am whole, all the same.