Abomination #

he was born screaming,
not in protest, but as if to confess,
as if the world deserved to know
it had just been cursed.

his parents didn’t love the way he laughed,
or how his presence clung like a stain.
he began to tear himself apart,
scraping off the dirt of who he was,
offering the pieces as penance,
but no matter how much he bled,
he could never scrub himself clean.

in school, he was the boy who sat too still,
a shadow out of place,
a smudge on their perfect picture.
he studied their smiles like commandments,
practiced their words like prayers,
and still, he failed.
his strangeness seeped through the cracks,
and when they didn’t call him strange,
they called him nothing.
so he clung to two others
not friends, just fixtures
who didn’t tell him to disappear.

when he switched schools,
he thought he could start over,
but filth doesn’t fade, does it?
on the first day, his silence betrayed him,
his eyes darting like a rat’s,
searching for scraps of approval.
what did they like?
what would make him look
less like a mistake?
the headaches came as often as his failures,
his masks crumbling faster than he could build them.

he made friends, he thinks,
but they only keep him around
because throwing him out
would be worse than tolerating him.
he believes this. he knows this.
their patience isn’t affection

it’s endurance.
friendship is sacred to him,
but not to them.
he’s just another burden
they’ve learned to carry.

he doesn’t know who he is anymore,
and maybe that’s a kindness.
the boy he used to be
the quiet one,
the one with the book in his hands,
hated by teachers, despised by peers
was just another version of the same filth.
this version is no better,
only older,
only uglier.

when he looks in the mirror,
he sees a thing pretending to be human.
flaws aren’t enough of a word.
he’s rot disguised as skin,
decay masquerading as flesh.
he works out to keep the illusion alive,
but the mirror knows.
he dreams of clawing himself apart,
tearing through the disguise,
to find the thing he knows is there
the abomination,
the wretch who doesn’t deserve this air,
this earth, this life.

he wants to be understood,
but what is there to understand?
he’s a coward, a leech,
a failure marked by disgrace.
his poems are rants, his words are lies,
his attempts at creation only proof
that even art can rot.

he distances himself,
and they let him,
because they’ve learned to live without him.
friends, family, even the stars
they know he’s weight,
and he knows it too.

he is a child who never stopped acting,
but the act was never convincing.
and the tragedy is,
he was always the villain.
no one asked him to perform.
no one asked for him at all.