It's the feeling you're out of sorts
Inherent, deep-rooted, and burning in your guts
Except you, with your swaying gait, don't even know what you should be chasing
The blurry light at the end of a collapsing tunnel
The salvation everyone seems to have an image of.
You'd listen, quietly, to the variations of it
Said with a wistful smile, a shuddering breath, a running tear, a prideful grin
You'd listen, quietly, and realise that, no
They don't know either. Clueless as you are.
Except your cluelessness seems to be a bigger sin than theirs
Trailing behind you in flickering streets
Staining the words that bubble out of you into something mean
They don't know either, so why is your ignorance bound to such extremes?
The sky rumbles every night, watching you cry into it with open hands
It is displeased with your act of pleading, you are too.
Your ignorance of the human ways seldom lets you go of its touch
Something scalding at the tips of your quivering fingers
A clear warning to the other ones.
You listen, quietly, and bury your fingers in hiding
With a cold, pulsing ache, you paste a faint smile
Waiting for the descriptions to end.
You have never used the words rolling over their tongues
Familiar, practised, and almost horrifying to hear
Like you have been sure to miss something, some things, just by the act of your birth.
You listen, quietly, with venom bubbling behind teeth
Lashing in silence at the sated eyes of ones not in debt
Your ignorance stacks the odds against you, each a hefty price, waiting and waiting and waiting
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While your ears are filled with dreamy tones
The colours of an open sky, the rumbling of a human voice.
What is different, you wonder, eyes tracing and hands drawing blood
What is so wholly, awfully, drastically different in the map of your soul
That it only ever leads to ruins?
Nothing buried under the sand, except the things you pushed into the earth with hot tears
An almost inhuman wailing, a repeated wish, bones of your own covered by the grains of a grave well-loved.
The fury of a not-quite-human is quite horrible to bear.
The envy it plants, engraved in the small beginnings of you, snarling and scratching and screaming at the ease of the others
Why not me? A reoccurring whisper, trembling on its way to the sky
Why not me? A defeated flag, raised with the sounds of a hundred thunders
The pictures drawn with a kind brush turn into droning in the back of your head
Persistent, so persistent, you bite back tears and cover it with a curse.
The ringing of unlikeness burrows into your hollow bones
Vibrating, shaking, listening with crazed eyes
A hysterical laugh stuck in your throat, waiting until the paint dries into something you wish to tear.
The humour of the colours making up your walls rarely escapes you
A crooked mask of a thing, a clown silent in front of a laughing crowd, a blaring, perfect knife to the heart.
You are made up of spite and little else.
A sardonic quirk of lips, hiding gritted teeth
An idiot late on most accounts, faulting the world for falling at the seams.
Your garden holds what you bury with little affair
Every space you tear open is only slightly different than the rest veiled
An ugly green rapidly fading in front of your dripping treasures
A mess of sand, stones, bones, and marrow.
The versions you bury witness the undoing of you
Each moment a different soul
The quiet one you buried with echoing screams
The smiling one you spit into the earth, bile on your tongue
An angry, biting thing suffocated with bloodied hands
A gentle, loving facade mercilessly torn and thrown into a void
The rest of you, the whole of you
Is always buried in your bones.
You are failure and nothing else
Every try tucked in your chest
We will learn
But you will not
Each time a new flaw pulls at your guts
We will learn
But you will not
Each brush you hold only ever results in things better untold.
The smiling idiot, wondering about the steps they should fill
Did they miss a class, a summary, something vital in them?
The gallows call for their ignorance
Each blood spilled making way for another failure
They stopped listening a while ago
When the tones turned biting and cold
Staring at the distant sky, watching it fill the hollowed earth
Why me?
Nothing ever answers.