Trigger Warning

Wear your mask and take my hand,
I want to hear all about you and
I heard it’s much easier to tell the truth
When no one can see who’s who.

You’re of great interest to me &
Undeniably precious to somebody
Special, their face may just come to mind;
I just hope it’s not mine.

I’m the type of predator you weren’t expecting to find but found you:
I’m the type of fiend who told you lies while your naive heart told the truth.

The devil who convinced you not to kill yourself a thousand miles away,
Just to confine you in his motel room;
Trade your prescription for a carpool,
Airplane mode is always useful.

Abuse has happened to us all and trust me/I’m in that group, I’ve been raped too,
So when I take advantage of you, Dissociation should be easy to slip into.

(Authors Note: Written from the presumed perspective of the man who assaulted me. Very difficult to scrape off my chest. Hence the title.)

-LM

Scattered

My handwriting used to be beautiful
Now, reduced to a scrawl
I can feel myself weakening, but
like a rushing train, cannot stop it
I merely stand by,
avoid the impact,
brace the rush of wind as it passes.

Isn’t life? That train, that rush?
The adrenaline of not knowing how
Or when, your body will betray you next?
I suppose it’s not game over until someone
Or Something
Calls time,
/&you’d never know I was here.

Everybody wants to make an impact
And I fear I have/
But not in the ways I signed up for
It pisses me off how they shrug it off
How Nothing affects them but their own
Selfish
Bullshit.

Or am I talking to myself?

I wish I didn’t have the poetry
Didn’t start to write stories
Didn’t have all these Words
And no traction
I wish I had dialed down the rosy tone &
Shook myself out of my magical carpet
Where I/ in tandem with Them/
Hurt me so often

(Authors note: )

 

–LM

Bare Bones

Why not?

Words seemingly dealt in haste,
yet expressed with fervor, consideration,
excitement: tempered by time.

Halfway up the mountain was I
when I suddenly realized
not only was the air paper-thin,
& the view, the endless sky, laced in a gauze of clouds unreal, bleeding sun

Something so imponderable, I could not have envisioned the whole picture;
Finally! The risk was worth the reward.

-LM

Strangers

Life is sometimes an unbearable thing.

A frame of a moment in time when shame had been the only thing you felt; no quick-snatched emotion could hide it, despite regular efforts to disguise it.

Something shattered, and when I went to gather the pieces He was suddenly there, like a retort. I didn’t know if he was what I was expecting, or what indeed I was expecting…

Pretenders in society stand out like a shrieking woman. His suit was the color of arson; his tie and vest underneath were black, and soft too, like the underbelly of a raven. The energy was very similar to that of something burning, the nonstop combustion and rising heat, sweltering us both as he came too close. He pressed his fingertips under my chin, gently so I would stand. We knew each other as kids, but life had transformed him into a man. Beneath the veneer of conviviality, he was hardened and sharpened like a dagger. Crisp and clean and deadly.

He chuckled a devastating couple of notes, like something Beethoven might’ve wrote… and I was bare.

-LM

(Authors Note: Not quite the usual.)