see my scars

the echoes drained from my throat like
crimson gushing from the open wound
torn through my heart you cried and I
threaded the needle to pierce your tender
skin weary from my own venom that seers
from the tip of my tongue in fiery flames
to sew the newborn stitches of cruelty
into your heart after you broke mine like the
elegant china in my grandmother's cabinet
before she surrendered to a worse place I
sowed these seeds beneath your veins of
pristine periwinkle and dawned deeper into
your bones of unwilling stone until my
scales threatened the optimism of the
only sun and creased the finishing folds of
this warped and wasted energy at
pretending you were happy is tucked into
these pockets of hatred that dive deeper
than the water-adorned hole we dug in
the sand the one scornful day and now I
release this fire-ridden breath of every
thing I've bottled up with an old cork and
tossed away to only wash up on this
battered and disheleved shore relentlessly
this time after the years of millenia traveling
through the timeless forever I clutch
the glass and take my tender fingers of
unpolished nails beaten down raw and
stratches of each scar of my own fiery
breath I birth each wisp of truth lifting
the ugly cap as they release into the
ether and this weight has left like the
stones off the shoulders and I am
ridden of my sleek scales with no more
breath of flames to flush out to you
and all of them and I am this tender
inkling of raw redness and these eyes
of youthful hazel gleem up to reach and take it
all back every thing you know now I
am this shriveled being of my naked
form bent over the hours ticking until I
lift my swollen head to rise to the
cloud like a the duck from my bathtub
when I was young to tell you of now
and I am an open book finally peeled from
its swallows with faded notes in bleached
ink scribbled last minute in the margins I am
here and this is the only unmasked reality
the ugliest and purest of them that I will
withhold in my reality when the bottle will
never be corked and the scales will never
return and in turn this fiery breath needs
no longer when I don't need to savor the
nostalgia of hatred that I release now
and step forward through the foggy vines
through the ancient bridge to my
ancestors and free myself from me to
this reality where I am only the most
pruned vulnerable reality I can become
in this world where I strive for change
in this buried stormcloud of never
that fell with my scales to become
no longer as I reveal my gnarly yet
healing with these new stitches we sew
I reveal my naked scars as I grow back each
sore white of the knowing moon of
my no longer crushed nails to release the
glimmering bottle of the newly returned
sun back into the ocean and its blissfully
inconsistent waves its cork swimming
like the optomistic dolphins bathing under
the optomistic sun in the direction opposite
never shall they meet never shall I be
encaged by these rusty chains too old
for me now and unfit like the butterfly
swimsuit from so long ago still in my closet I
release my ability to ever lock my reality
my truth up and down in this bottle
again for one other across the oceans
to follow my journey we will thrive and
strive I am thriving and striving to find
change when this pale-skinned normal
will never defeat this exotically shifting reality
now I find change to become change all
to make this life one that I will
remember.