My shoes are my own,
cheap, unchallenging,
made for me to meander and muse,
while I sing the blues and cry with the eyes of a criminal.
Someone told me once that I couldn’t be captured,
and it consumed me,
because it felt like a fated prophecy,
some kind of inexplicable, inescapable destiny,
and the lines on my hand all seemed to lead that way,
so I began flying at night,
to keep my feet on the ground.
I have suffered for every syllable and stanza.
I don’t expect you to accept that,
because you’ve invented a perception of me in your head,
once one that you adored and now one that you despise,
and while I’m not interested in trying on either costume,
I just thought you should know that my shoes are my own,
and the words are weaved within me,
tangled in the trending scale of my moods,
but always grown in the way I could never convince a child to do.
If a heart was found bleeding,
then I don’t know why anyone would look at me.
My hands are, as always, immaculately clean,
never holding a knife to the soft skin of hope,
never bruising anything but an ego,
that was forthcoming with false apologies that faded in the scrutiny of sunlight.
You broke your own heart, babe.
You stood above your own bed,
broke inside your own chest and crushed your heart until it stopped beating.
I just sat at your bedside, aghast,
asking why you’d do something so self sabotaging.
It might have been “worth it”,
if I’d got any good work out of it,
worth it to feel degraded and like I’d fallen back to a place I couldn’t escape,
and even now,
you act like you couldn’t understand my apprehension,
while repeating a bullshit mantra of “I hear you. I feel you. I see you.”
You see what you want to see,
you hear the “No” and ask again anyway,
you feel aggrieved,
telling your few followers all about “me”,
but you don’t mention the pressure,
the guilt trips,
the gaslighting,
the drip, drip, drip assault of my boundaries,
because you only hear me,
when I am reading your script.
If you feel “amateur”, take a writing class.
It would definitely help.
Sincerely, Jennifer x 