Cracked

“Broken,” they say.

“Shattered.”

It is the curse of a poet to always be in pieces.

Like a smashed glass or ceramic plate,

the reader must always know I’m a china doll,

cracked.

And disintegrating.

The world has chipped away at my spirit,

carving into it like chisel in stone.

I’ve been destroyed,

like a snow globe dropped.

And although my heart beats with the ferocity of a passionate youth,

and beautiful prose drips from my pen,

I am not whole.

I’ve been tortured with truth,

cut, wounded, slit and scratched.

Dropped and mishandled.

I’m a glass bottle thrown on brick,

a mirror smashed;

an egg hurled out the window,

a china doll cracked.