I wish, I wish, I wished
And wanted, and they told me that it
Drew away so much from my character.
So I stopped wishing for things that I didn’t believe in,
And I made up my own gods to play with as a child does
In a make-believe castle built out of cardboard or laundry baskets.
Of course it was wrong, I was wrong; a blasphemous being made simply
In being a follower of a religion of my own making.
Gods cannot hide from the world
In cardboard castles or laundry bins,
They must seek to thrive above it.
For so many years, I looked up to the sky
With eyes full to the brim of nothing short of wonder.
I stopped believing that society would ever help me,
And so I made up my own gods instead
To help me live through my man-made Hell.
Now, I am a skidding track for off-road trucks;
People rush towards me with eyes closed
And after one quick kiss, back off
Because I’ve scared them so,
They’re shaken through their souls.
The ground-up fragments of bone
Upon my spineless, arching back
Yield only to haywire trucks,
They form a battleground
Suited for everything but love.
No one wanted the girl with
The crooked back,
And how I wished to shed my skin
And trade it into the gods of my own creation.
But even they would not make a move to save me,
Because we can’t rid each other of another’s Hell.
So this road-bump girl lay bleeding
For the longest time in the porcelain sink,
Only wishing to be washed down it;
If only to be met
With a timely surge
Of untimely death.
This is the story of a girl
Lost in the treasure trove of a monster’s house.
And how she begged her gods to save her skin,
But even they refused to stoop so low.
Candleships 