Self Portrait

I have never been beautiful

Not in a typical sense

Not in the manufactured sense

You’ll never see makeup

Redefining my features

My pallor, is almost shocking

The sun does not touch

The ghost of my skin

I don’t even burn usually

There’s a possibility that I am so fair

I reflect the sun rays back

Like a mirror

I have freckles dusted lightly

I used to hate them

Now I no longer see them

My hair is every shade of autumn

The brown of drying leaves

The red and golds of change

I am proud to say I don’t have any grey

But the sun once turned it hot pink

Its thick and coarse

Completely impossible

Like the wool on a sheep

Long and in deep waves

That cannot be straitened

My eyelashes are the same colors

Frighteningly long

So I never wear massacre

Because it makes me look like a doll

My eyes are every color of the sea

Blues, greys, greens

And a ring of gold in the center

Like a tiny sun

Everything about the way I look

Is vaguely confused

Like it just couldn’t decide

Which color and so it embraced them all

=

I am small, not tiny

I have breasts and enough of an ass

But no hips at all

My weight is mostly sequestered

In muscular legs

Calves are gigantic

I have had a child

So I bare the scars of a mother

Their not beautiful but their mine

And hers, our sacred bond

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I have an oddly angular face

Since I am Cherokee on one-side

I have high-cheekbones

And a narrow forehead

With lines around my eyes

From the upward pressure

My nose hooks just a little

I have a witches chin

And a tiny mouth

With a peculiar fanged smile

That scrunches up my nose

Some people say I look like a lion

My husband says I am squirrel

Because of the way I nibble

Protectively at my food

I am not beautiful

Or ordinary

I am me

It took me a long time

To understand that

That’s enough

Sometimes though

I still don’t

=

(I just thought it would be nice to show appreciation for your unique beauty, I’d love to hear other’s descriptions of themselves =))

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Father

You turned your life over to the bottle

Long before I was even born

A bitch you loved more

Than all others

Baptizing your guilt

In a cheap facsimile of comfort

Replacing human warmth

With consumption

Unquenchable,

Your soul-numbing thirst

=

I do not think the drink made you cruel

You are inherently so

A true psychopath

How long I have lived

Weighed down by that heavy shadow

Believing inside I might be

Incubating the same disease

=

The drink only made you more brazen in your cruelty

Less cautious, as if you were invincible to consequence

Perhaps you were for like no other

You have made me feel so small

Bound in the belief

That if I loved unconditionally enough

You wouldn’t be able to hurt me

I protected you, stood up for you

Adored you even though

=

You become a man, wasted

Emaciated, skeletal

Your skin

Brutal gouges cut in a desert landscape

You lost all of your teeth

So that your face collapsed

Your hair was a network of infinitely over-lapping wires

Your face had been deformed from too many provoked fights

I hated when people told me I looked like you

That my angled Cherokee nose

Was the same predatory beak attached to your

Horridly aging face

I wanted to be proud of that nose

Those high cheekbones

But they were reflections of your face too

=

The worst thing though is not the physical death

For surely you are dying

But the decay of the spirit

I saw you disappearing before me

Destroyed, driven mad

Lashing out at strangers in the streets

How many times did I have to steady your rage

As you threatened to kill for a glance

For another imagined slight

=

Even though I can no longer bare your presence

Or the pride you have in violence

Every now and then

Someone tells me of a terrifying man

Homeless perhaps, Schizophrenic surely

And it always turns out to be you

Father

=

(honestly this is quite tame since I didn’t go into the abuse, I have another poem that I have never shared I think it would be too hard to read and may be too hard to share)

Winter Night

Despondent

Winter’s endless nights

The stars like

Shards of ice

In mercurial black pools

Frozen, infinite

=

(My painting is actually blue but it didn’t suit the description)