In the first half of my life I was scrubbed raw
in baths before bed,
a kids safety gate kept me inside
and I knocked three teeth clean out.

Now I am
kept inside me,
two decades of skin like zebra stripes
and grey leather shoes, I never knew those ugly gaps
were me punching and slapping away the lines,
I could not sob this attitude out of me.

Like heavy batteries all used up, my heart does not jump
across the changes.
It waits with car keys in its pocket
and traffic lights on its head.

Please do not stall today.
It loosens from eyelids
and make onomatopoeia bangs and snaps.  

It buttons up its shirt and leaves
early in the morning and I grab oxygen with bony fingers
and try to stuff it down my throat.

Maybe then it won’t have camera-snapping-shut pains,
like sliced onion-flesh, inside.

I sometimes have a hairclip fastened to my lip
and I’m twirling around in the kitchen
with glasses of wine being pushed down a windpipe,
I am just covering up things
like bruises and broken plates,

really, I want to fall onto broken knee caps,
shove metal into my skin
and yank out things like all the ugliness
that clogs up my blood stream.