Rail against my insides
Clog my arteries with lemonade
Smash my head against the palisades
Surrender to the masquerade
This whirlwind will encircle me
Feast upon my personality
Plaster misplaced loyalty
Where I never wanted it to be
Dissected by machinery
Born on an operating table
Different bells, different fable
But simple, randomized modification
Leaves me immobile

I don't know whether or not I'm supposed to confront this
But the only thing I can ever hear is the winding up, tisk tisk
A knife still traces your foot whether you move forward or backward
The irony that even this poem would dare to rhyme and fixate me with a metal mobile

I'm tired of tracing the edges of a box and never watching my finger rush down into the center
To trace odd shapes and burst into fireworks
I'm tired of walking along a tightrope when nylon jungle gyms shoot between my arms and legs, a tension I shouldn't know hurtling me forward
Is this even real?

I'm tired of asking
I'm tired of running in circles and circles but I was supposedly born on a track
And somehow that beautiful poetry still morphs into something savage
Only makes problems worse as it lulls me in with its charming metaphors
But they distort the past and they marble the present
Leave undulations where verticality would do
The power of fiction is supposed to be a marvel, a mirror
But we forget the warping inherent to the life we live