Depression does not always bear its teeth
It hides itself away and tears out if its shell when you least expect it
It wants you all to itself to play
when you begin to share a laugh with your oldest friends
It fires its shotgun in the middle of your English class
to rip you from your focus
It scrapes all the words from your throat with its claws when they ask you what’s wrong
and it takes its knife to carve “nothing, I’m fine”
into the space in your mouth where the truth used to sit
before it crawled in through your windows one day uninvited
and whispered,
“let’s be friends.”