Winter

you are born with a cavity in your chest.

a hole where your heart should be. you decorate your thin, blued lips with roses, and you plump your hollowed cheeks with sun-haze. but it can not cure the winter of your bones; the corpses that dance between your ribs. because you are born with caskets tied to your ankles, and anchors tethered to your limbs that drag you further, and further, and further until you drown.

you inscribe your words into wood; bonded to the collective darkness that bandages your heart as if vulnerability is your wound. sometimes, there is too much heat. your bruised fingertips are singed by the fire that blooms from their chests, and you find yourself recluse again. an oddity among mankind. 

you are born with the snow. you are born and offered to winter, as a newborn with scrambling limbs and muffled screams. you are cruel as a child; you pick at scabs and count the undertones of your hampered breathing patterns as a remedy for the violence that is bred within your bones. you grow into a lonely thing. 

you are a wild child born to women with crossed hands and bowed heads; a brevity of confidence where there had once been none. you refuse to be of them, shake their stories from your skull, erasing the lullabies they'd planted in your heart. you wanted a cacophony - the brilliance of dysphoria as it paints it's way across your membrane. in the heart of the night, you crawl under itchy sheets and promise that you will empty your veins of them: refuse to be restrained and softened into a peach that is made impure by a man's hands. 

you are the divided myth of a broken household, a fragment of the father you never knew and the ghost of a mother who had long since passed. you are violent, you are cruel, and you are selfish. you are not bound by your bruised knees or your dirty knuckles.