You forget how you’re meant to live

When you live without a name. 

You spend your life watching from afar

It’s when your skin feels foreign, 

Clinging to you like a stolen fabric. 

When your muscle and fat seem to all sit

Asymmetrically to your bones, 

Building you up as a misaligned and eroded sculpture. 

When your blood pumps through your body

Like an overworked factory line, 

Clanking and grinding, 

But only a single worker toils in the shadows to keep it all running. 

When your hair tugs on your scalp like unseen claws. 

Its grasp is so tight it pulls you down, down, down.

It allows gravity to hold you captive, 

To haul you further to the ground 

Until earth opens up and its abomination of a mouth swallows you whole.

Through roots and rot you try to swim, 

But the ground keeps pulling you down, down, down. 

You force yourself through mounds of dirt, 

But the whispering worms squirm around your ears, 

Speaking to you false stories of your demise. 

You claw towards the light, 

Crying out for someone to help. 

But only silence answers. 

No hands reach for yours. 

No voice calls the name you’ve waited to find. 

In a panic, you look around as the dirt begins to bury you alive, 

But no one’s there. 

Only you. 

Just before the soil covers you 

And your last breath of air slips away from your lips, 

You realize you were always the one. 

The only one who could pull yourself free. 

But you realized it one moment too late. 

Had you reached to grab yourself before the earth closed in, 

Had you carried your own weight before gravity pulled you in, 

Perhaps you would have risen. 

Perhaps you would have stood tall. 

Perhaps you still can.