days when my eyelids flutter like frail

butterflies straining against

a blustery wind and my face contorts

like cottontail rabbits shuddering from the drugs

sliding down their gullet and you say

you wished these compulsions were yours—

you want these cruel masters whipping my brain into a bloodied

mess if only to be as smart as me—and my life shrinks

like the dying sun shrinks when the murky

waves of the horizon swallow it each

day

and my life is but a mothball-ridden costume

because what else is mental

illness good for except

impersonation

fools.

when you drape a still-bloody fur

scarf around your perfume-infused neck you do not

become the mink that scurried

before the rising sun...

days when my passion seeps through my sobbing

veins and puddle around the splintering graphite

of my pencil, curdling on command so that all

my distraught eyes see are lines of wobbling

text

imperfect like the paranoid, whimpering

dog

that my heart has become as it sprints, its whines

off-pitch, its gait

unsteady, trying to escape the sneers of OCD stamped on

each palpitation but

there is no escaping the fear of contamination and reek of indecisiveness that

was gifted to my beautifully flawed soul, but you do not

understand and so you mock

my ritualistic unzipping of backpacks each day in fear

of forgetting books and religious worship

of soap

days when my heart resigns and my eyes shutter, refusing to

fly this broken-winged airplane spiraling towards

suicide and still i clutch the leaden weight of my fallacious logic as i flail

in the bogs of society and still i feel

the serpent writhing in the folds

of my brain and i finally know who is the

fool.