earthbound ✓

schwellen(angst)

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

i've got my father's eyes.

i'm not pretty enough to be on television. i've got lemon eyes and i'm a little sour on the tongue. i'm rain-wrapped and bug-bitten on the outskirts of town. and i'm feigned-golden. i'm the brown girl in the white man's world and i have copper fluid in my heart. i'm inherently unkind and outlawed from their pearl pedestals.

but i've got my father's eyes.

and i don't want to see the world through them. it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

and i don't want to see mama through them. it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

i think he loved me, but it would only last a few hours. enough for the cotton candy clouds to soak in the pink and oranges, drain the skies and heavens from all the colors that paint them pretty.

perhaps that one night when i laid on his lap and fell asleep under the star-studded skies, splattered in ocean tears, perhaps that's how it feels to be loved- but i never had a dad, just a father.

and i learned to be afraid of that love. frankly, i didn't have a choice.

maybe if i spit out poetry pretty enough, i'll get over it.

exposure therapy. that's what they call it right?

so i stand at the mirror and his gaze is cold on my skin. i never knew him well enough to know myself.

maybe his anger was justifiable. maybe it's that toy-heart-love-me-love-me-not-undo-me-till-i-am-red-clay-and-anything-but-your-daughter-anger that you feel and maybe that's how fathers are hardwired to be.

but i can't let go of the violence. i can't outrun the whiskey he spits back in the glass and i can't find enough hearts to beat just so mine would beat.

i've got my father's eyes but-

i don't find porn too appealing.

pain great enough to make you moan is pure bullshit. a pain so sweet you'd wish anything upon your body so you'd never get rid of it. i say it's just a good old romanticization of pain and suffering. why depict it as pleasurable to begin with?

there's nothing sexy about misery, to moan and to groan as you are brutalized. do you really like the pain or is it just glorified beyond your reach?

i am war declarations at the break of dawn, bandaids ripped off a child's scraped knees, i'm memoirs of gone ghosts on blue bibles and when my father cleaved the wood in our backyard to make fire, he had forgotten i was just as much a part of these earth grounds as mama.

she's earthbound and so am i- but he didn't know me well enough to know he severed my roots and now i can't plant myself home.

i've got my father's eyes-

in a mason jar under my bed and it's starting to reek.