November 9 Thoughts

I apologize to my mother and father

I am not strong. I cry small stars

For each person I will not save.

I have not enough vertebrate to lift each slouching back,

not enough tendons to lift each delicate lip into a smile,

not enough tears to glisten each dulling eye,

not enough skin to warm each cold feet.

Or money to donate to every hunger

or pigment to give out

or teach you how to be proud

or how I can be proud of myself.

But my physicality is walking, still too much of me.

I must be selfish.

Forgive my boney fingers let them be death

Painlessly and easing you into this newly constructed rhetoric of fear.

I apologize.

For the time I folded petals with my drops of blood and flesh

he merely picked out of his teeth with a toothpick.

I apologize to him and others for my audacity

Assumed vulnerability dipped in insensitivity

I’m dipping my wounds in buckets of peroxide

I’m trying so hard not to pick at the scabs

You never noticed you created

You only noticed the scars others left