Tattooed Shards

Tattooed Shards

You Don’t Get Me anymore

Photo by erin mckenna on Unsplash

Kisses tattooed me from your frozen lips,

I felt my body temperature plummet with each tattoo you placed.

Your icy tongue traced my neck.

This is something I’d learned to bear, allowing the shards to creep down my throat, shredding internally with sharp fragments so hold they burn and I choke.

Your kisses burned just as much as they drilled into my skin showing permanently forever.

You’re mine mine mine he said with his eyes.

He bites me.

You’re a good girl. Let them see you belong to me. Those tattoos will never leave and I will own you forever.

Don’t you dare swoop out in the middle of the night with your music, your poems, your songs bleeding from your gashed mouth.

Your lips were thin always, pursed, and spun with the sugary ice, melting & dripping until I see gashes of cold burned white hot on your lips and then mine.

I didn’t realize to hold you meant to be bound by a singular rope cloaking my body and holding me as your possession.

Where did I go wrong?

I played the parts.

I swept bad feelings and your shame and mine among the this dust clogging my ears, my mouth, my nose, my eyes.

This is why I have cloudy eyes. I suck your roughness into my brain where at least I can battle it for you.

You told me I was a sea of green and blue and gray waves, crashing on the rocky beach, but alas without scooping myself with the grace of the woman I was supposed to be.

I carried myself to mirrors.

Why do I want to shatter the mirror all the time.

I imagine my hand smashing and smashing until my knuckles hurt and I didn’t care anymore.

You brought me so called freedom as you pinned me down.

You kissed me and I felt my lips turn to stone.

I am a battered solider, showing up half dead to the land I used to feel safe in. I swooped to my tree.

I felt the soil.

The leaves.

The cold, hard rocks cradling my body.

I don’t know where I am or where I’m supposed to be, but I’m supposed to believe that you don’t matter and your scars branded, burning my skin, mean nothing and I should pull myself through, dainty, witty, lovely, and finefinefine.

-Elyse Wright