Flinch

That flinch you see when you raise your voice,

you’re not imagining it,

it is a scar of the past,

a fingerprint pressed into the soft wax heart of a child,

who wanted nothing more than peace and quiet.

The scars didn’t show for many years,

they lay invisible until I took the blade to myself,

and gave them life,

gave them angry red lips that fade into pale raised mounds,

like the Chinese tombs of its emperors,

invisible unless you know where to look,

hiding the pain and death under pretty green fields.

There is a roadmap of pain on my thigh,

it isn’t the first,

only the freshest,

a stinging reminder of my failure to adapt and conform,

a bleeding punishment for being fat and ugly and mean,

an angry cross-hatch of wounds I don’t want to see heal.

That soft wax heart never grew hard and tough as it should have,

instead, it melted into a misshapen lump,

ugly,

inside and out.