broken bones and patchwork veins...

let me bring you back to seventeen...

the memories have become darkened,
hard to recollect...
lost to the years,
chemicals and poisons...

but i remember
the restlessness
that breeds madness
and self mutilating emotional torture.
the long, long fear filled nights
when sleep would never come,
no matter how still i lay.

i was a mere child
in a body
filled with the age
and battering
beyond my years.

seventeen...
the year i found my savior
and my all consuming vice...
or perhaps when i discovered hell.

no...
that was yet to come...
still, years away.

it was just a glimpse, i saw then
and i ran,
naive and still innocent.
almost untouched.
all that told were those lines
running in the bend of my arms.
hidden, well, deceptive.

i am not sure
what may have been worse...
the torment that existed
within myself
or...
the misery i lived
the next ten years
to silence it?

i should say existed.
i never lived.

but somehow,
with so, so many gone,
perished,
i stand here,
continuing with breath
filling me, feeding my soul.

aware, whatever each of us
denies...
within lies a demon.
knowing mine has not yet
beaten me...
with my hope and...
desire, maybe never will.

i still own that maybe.