Hush - Poem

I was born in the wrong skin.

Started off too loose,

too comfortable for me

to breathe.

So they took me back and ripped my seams

and stitched me up again.

But now it shrinks around me

when I sweat, or cry

or bleed.

Then that one time I popped a seam

and everything spilled from me.

So you plucked a patch of your own cells,

and said the change would do me good,

said it would fit me perfectly.

So I stitched the pieces to myself

and it worked,

for a while,

until your life grew dull to me

and I ventured beyond the limits of your skin.

Though maybe it was my own fault,

that I was too bold with the liberties you granted me,

that I had it coming really,

the name-calling, the humiliation,

the violence towards me.

Maybe I should have just lived as I was told to,

seek the life I was supposed to,

not stray the way my tattered shrunken skin wanted to.

Now I know

your skin’s not meant for me.

Once it might have,

before you told me my skin was wrong

and they had it cut away from me.

Now this skin’s too tattered to be fixed

and I must hide myself away,

hide the scars, the jutting bones and arteries

so I don’t scare people in the streets

with the damage that was done to me.

This world of yours is too small

for guys like me with patchwork skin

to ease through and carry on.

Because there is nothing wrong with me.

I know this skin of mine is torn

and it will wound and scab with time

and rot away from me

but it’s the skin you gave to me.

So go ahead,

hang me by the toes

until my nostrils bleed.

Sentence me to hard labour

until it drives me Wilde,

because this skin of mine will never stretch

to fit my bones more delicately,

but it will hold me together in fleshy stitches

while yours itches and burns.

Just because you patched this skin once

doesn’t make it yours

to do with as you please,

because your skin fits so ‘perfectly’.