My eyes are full of stone.

I tell a hackneyed story,
I know, but it's hacking
me
apart
I hold dust,
and night,
and nothing

I’m alive in my dreams;
I wonder when I wake:

If I can't hear myself breathe
do I live?
If voices drown out
the beat of my heart
will each artery
cease to be a part of me?
If I stop running
down these echoes of halls
will I fall?

My own arms are too weary to catch me,
but my weight is too much for another to bear
so I flee from the ledge and
from the light.
I sit in my castle of glass,
my back pressed to the idea of walls

and I catapult boulder after boulder
through my fragile fortress
until I am broken from within,
my jagged fragments refracting
fractals of my light and darkness
onto someone else's face,onto the face of my father
stamped on my banners, vandalism
of the soul.

I turn to face it
I erase it

the stain lingers still

I’m safe, but not really,
a victim, but only of
my mind

so, crumpled, I curl
in the circle of my shattered shield
holding back the world I have flattened
pounded into a silent, scarlet-streaked monster.

so, shaking, I curl
in a glass house
and throw stones.

It's okay
It's okay
I'm okay

I can hear it again,
above the sacred admonitions
I’ve ignored, above
the roar of the flames,
the song of the rain,
I hear it:

the sound of my breath
in
     out
in
     out

          in

I am alive
even when I open my eyes.

Once I was a ninja, a hero, an angel.
Once I was a liar, a sinner, a thief.
Once I was a child, and then something darker.
Once I was nothing, and then I was anything.

Once I dreamed of chess, of lemonade, of being abandoned with my sister and my ice cream.
I was six or seven.

Once I stood in icy waters
up past the edge of my bright red shorts
sand between my toes, freezing blades in my thighs
so cold it burned, until I felt nothing
I laughed as I fell back, and thought myself mad.
I was eleven.

Once I rode in a car like the ocean
and felt the music reverberate through every atom of the universe
and dissolved into the traffic lights’ reflection
on the slick pavement
and was free.
I was thirteen.

There is still the scent of the night and the taste of the storm.

I can break glass and stones and sky and soul,
but I will remain.

I am alive
eyes open,
hands open.
I can walk and I can wait.

Here she is, a girl of stone and glass.
She's silent but she's here.
She’s broken but she breathes.

I am alive.
I am alive.