i am convinced that monsters exist.

they are what keep us up at night.

they stalk you and your strength, drain you until you are but a pretty face with crippled fingers, oh so delicate,

shape you into their own perfect possession.

they are what control how fast you age, not time.

each year of a life brings more chance of a monster,

each year brings new guilts, until you are handed to the butchers.

my years like to bring change and new people, dragging them along like ball and chain,

my years toss the change and people to me like a mass that grew spikes, eager to get them off their hands.

my years bring change into my throat,

blocking me like a plastic bag so heavily hung within my neck.

each year i feel it grow, with each nightmare and tear, my hiccups drag the expansion like wet paper,

sticky and thick, it cannot be peeled from my skin so easily.

last year we plucked our eyelashes and complained about their absence,

but that’s just the consequence of naivety, our youth taking too much pity on us to give us monsters yet.

this year we breathe fire and hide in our own skin because we feel the monsters breath.

we no longer complain,

we build.

build arguments and defenses with our fire breath, holding our arms like cage walls, useless defenses.

we huddle in corners, hand in hand,

because that way the daggers can’t find all of our plastic bags.

next year we will trail fingertips over rough skin we are too blocked by the bag in our necks to care for.

we will steadily lose our consciousness to the autopilot induced in us by the poison,

some of us will praise the emptiness of ourself, so pure and clean and pink within,

some of us will make red ribbons of our own body, attacking our already dead skin to do so just to prove that we, too, can feel,

some of us will pour our guts out to the butchers, carving careful pieces of our own body to try and fix ourselves, making our inner workings and thoughts into displays,

others will continue to breathe fire because their plastic bag melts quicker, their limbs stronger, and their youth more rich.

as we finish our years of blockage and shortage of breath, we will finally leak different stories from our ears and mouths, all from our same, shared world,

lifeless facts learned from lifeless mouths,

useless defenses against the monsters with sharp tongues and wire-tipped fingernails who always find a way.

we start to grow new bags,

bags under our eyes,

sprouted from the nightmares of the sharp tongues and wire fingernails that stick into our hair and mouth like sand, 

carved behind our eyelids and within our pupils.

the monsters like to play with our minds like clay, repeating our names, the way our titles roll of their tongues deliver shivers into our spines, white into our knuckles, and fire back into our breath.

the monsters like shaping each of our thoughts until we no longer feel them.

their wire fingernails cut into our safety,

their sharp tongues echo chants until they are engrained into us,

we are made into dolls, so perfectly trained,

we run off batteries given to us by the monsters, telling us what to do until the butchers steal our batteries and take them apart.

one by one we are studied until we are a shell, ready to be rebuilt.

after we have been lightened and we have been carved,

the seemingly endless lineups of butchers just dying to see how we think,

our plastic bags will have finally settled, air hitting our lungs with shock and life,

and we will be given rope, an unexpected new ball and chain disguised as gifts.

just another way to keep our necks ripe,

because after all,

the daggers will always find us,

and it’s best to keep ourselves ready for the inevitable.

the monsters who stick to us like sand,

who grow plastic bags made of our own fearful tears and dead skin,

who poison our hair and our guts,

giving the butchers just more reason to carve us open and see our roots, guts, and the sand that poisoned our thoughts.