Shattered Glass

I’m not a poet by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes—very rarely, I play with the genre just to satiate a little voice inside my head. I wrote this poem about a decade ago, and I’m sharing it here not because I think it’s great. Quite the contrary, actually. I don’t think it’s a good poem at all. But I’m asking a community of writers to be vulnerable and share their musings. In the spirit of managing expectations, I’m sharing this to demonstrate that your writing doesn’t need to be perfect for it to have a home here.

Shattered Glass

I wish that someone would shatter these shit-colored glasses.

Instead, they shattered me

They killed part of me. They killed her….

Hanged in the town center like a witch, but even that wasn’t enough for them. 

They took sticks and battered her, watching with joy and pride for the beating they gave her.

She’s dead to me. 

I don’t know her anymore, and still, I sit with these shit-colored glasses blurring my vision. 

Listening to him make promises of a light at the end of the tunnel.

There’s no fucking light.

You’ll heal, they all say.

But I’m still picking up these pieces of her—these tiny fragments and shards—slivers of who I once was.

The broken glass slices, re-opening the wounds that will never heal, and I bleed. 

We bleed.

She’s dead to me; I’m eroding from the inside.

We share this vessel, and I cannot escape her.

They remember her, but they see me, yet I don’t know who I am.

I wish someone would shatter these shit-colored glasses so that I can see the light.

The light in me honors the light in you is a lie.

She’s dead to me.

There’s too much darkness.

He tried to clean up the mess.

Picked up the big pieces, swept away what he couldn’t collect.

He thought he got it all.

I still step on the slivers, though.

Sharp like razors cutting through my skin, they offer her an exit, but she won’t leave. 

So, I might.

She’s dead to me.