You were chiseling a masterpiece out of hopeless clay

Ended up sinking the scalpel into your fingers

Blood dripping

You scraped your skin to write my name

But how could I gulp a gallon down my throat when I had never had a drop

So I tried but choked, threw up and fled

Packing my half baked heart in a claustrophobic closet

Was it the time, efforts, feelings or just bad omen?

Or was it me who gathered an arduous nine for what deserved a Ten?

You were like the headrush from standing up too fast

I regret the haste

The neck cramp from sleeping wrongly

Regret the fleeting comfort

The drench in rain from believing the deceptive sun

Regret the faith

And maybe the carpet of lilies but on the fork I took the prickly curve

For you were the poem my mammoth of metaphors don’t deserve

We hated the sin for it was the sin

You kissed the sin for I was the sinner

Everytime I explore a passion, a person, a poem

I ask myself if this is what I’m seeking to give my Ten to

But end up saving it for my fictitious ‘Right’

Always forgetting Bible’s greatest commandment

You can’t give what you don’t have

Growing up every night I would fixate myself to the bedpost

Curl myself up in an armour

And whisper prayers under my breath

That the shouts be a monster and not my father

And the shrieks a demon but not my mother

So learned to mark myself a Ten

When I outperformed the highest scale of hostility and hatred

But my jerked heart couldn’t open it’s doors

And my slow brain couldn’t process your Ten

For my aversion couldn’t stand your love

I was debris in the unabated tornado

Naked, unprotected, Blase and haywire

You wanted to gather and settle

And I never opened my dark trunk of mess because what if you took the scrapes and fled?

Years later

I bury my swallowed screams

My peeping tears from the eyesdoors swollen of excess moisture

My sensitive nerves better left untouched

My fatigued desire for a ten

Writing elegies while you still write ballads

But you pull at a string

And all the beads come untied crashing against the floor

It’s noise, chaos, mayhem all over the place

A smokey familiar room in the eye of a cyclone

Bang of fist, a crash of dish, loud swearing

Blood and gore

The flashes and echoes spook

But I am delved too deep in the well of tranquility to be haunted now

Pokered up, resting by a gravestone of ashen memories

Plodding, I try to stand

I have to hold up and search the ten I’ve been seeking to give

Inside of me

But not today

Today, I have to atone for my sins

This could’ve been a numbered poem

But I cannot count my vices on fingers

For it’s now in the hands of god’s lawmen

I’ve laid my decrepit case open

Rate my vices on a scale of one to ten

I’ll cherish my first victory and go back to my selfish glen