Behind these eyes

I trace my fingers on my smooth skin and feel the repulsion of all the imperfections. You see, it's the possibilities of words as weapons, from my mouth I raged wars on my soul and created irreversible, loathsome scars from the wrong paths I've taken.

We don't come into this world with guidance, we come kicking and screaming, and for me, I came unnamed but scathed from who's ever hands molded me. Did they curse me? Some useable entity tugging on my puppet strings like I'm pinocchio for their amusement? Home wasn't home. My body wasn't my dome. Taking a road down memory lane, of how I lost myself time and time again while the world kept going, while life kept moving, while I didn't know who I was or what I was; girl or boy?

They say you can be whatever you want to be, yet a tiger can't change its stripes and a leopard can't change its spots. I didn't want to be a man. I was a man. I knew it in the way that I walked, the way that I talked, but the mirror told me otherwise. The reflection would stare me down as though I were the stranger and it was the truth.

I couldn't handle. I couldn't deal. So my answer was scars and scars. I could love but never be accepted. Thought I was enough but they wanted more. There were things people like me couldn't give, children I could never give. I knew how eyes would follow me down the street. How pronouns would make me weep.

They never knew the darkness stirring in my mind. They never knew how I wondered if I died would I be reborn right? They said it was a choice? Then I wouldn't have ever chosen hell. Bars that is my body. A caged that is my mind. I'm bound to a home that isn't my home, left to wonder when the reflection would be my own, left to wonder when relationships go wrong was it me and my insecurities?

I envy some guys I look at because they have what I don't. You say I have a heart, but where does that get me but beneath someone's feet, used, abused, cause they know someone like me would do anything for a little love, anything to be accepted, jump in someone's arms without a second thought because we want to be loved but some people don't know how to love us. How to see us.

When the colorful flags go down; I feel unlovable. Untouchable. Unreachable. Like a mistake. Never good enough. Can never give enough. My body is a cage, My mind is the bars.