Dark Marks and Scars | Teen Ink

Dark Marks and Scars

August 8, 2015
By LotusChild PLATINUM, Raleigh, North Carolina
LotusChild PLATINUM, Raleigh, North Carolina
32 articles 0 photos 62 comments

Favorite Quote:
"Let them hate, so long as they fear me" ~Colligula


Scrapes, cuts and burns leave new marks
Lines and ridges, patches of skin go dark
Every new drop of blood that leaves me
Collecting into a flood that seizes me
A man in the mirror, different each time
Inferior or superior at the end of the line
Am I perfect? Do I reflect whom I wish to be?
So imperfect, so I'm perfect, so lost, I can't see.
Is there a future where my face is unscathed
Where I stay in one place, my body kept unphased
Dazed and amazed at the days as they pass
Raised to be razed in this race, its too fast
Built to be broken, made and unmade
Will these differences in my skin ever fade?
What does it take to be strong? To hold on?
To burst through these walls and stay long
In this temporary world, finite and small,
But without all these imperfections, could I ever stand tall?
Could I take on the world if I hadn't hurt at all?

The divine flesh of the fair fairies so fresh,
Untouched by the earth, an unholy mesh,
The body cannot exist long without flaw,
Either it suffers in this world or no world at all,
Watch the earth rise to the gods' divine body,
Watch it take hold, no mistake, it's no folly
Its a fall we must take from the morning through the day,
As we take our first breath, to the night when we lay
Still without thought, owning all that we sought,
Littered with the marks from the war that we fought,
We cannot be without suffering, for it makes us who we are,
So I embrace my dark marks, for they have brought me this far.


The author's comments:

I have a LOT of scars.


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This article has 2 comments.


Beila BRONZE said...
on Aug. 17 2015 at 6:17 pm
Beila BRONZE, Palo Alto, California
3 articles 0 photos 516 comments

Favorite Quote:
"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." -Mark Twain

:D That is so long. I am laughing at myself right now. Sorry! I enjoy critiquing writing WAAY too much.

Beila BRONZE said...
on Aug. 17 2015 at 6:15 pm
Beila BRONZE, Palo Alto, California
3 articles 0 photos 516 comments

Favorite Quote:
"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." -Mark Twain

Nice to hear from your old self again. :) Seriously, though, I like the return to your old style. It's a strong poem, beautiful imagery, powerful punchline, all that I've come to expect from you. Now... here goes the nitpicking! :P There are a few places in this poem where I think you lose your easy rhythm, and I'm not sure why. Were you struggling with the rhyme in those places, or did you just not read it aloud before posting? For instance, "Collecting into a flood that seizes me" would read much more smoothly as "Collecting into a flood to seize me." The extra syllable in "seizes" messes with the rhyme to "leaves"; perhaps it is a more exact rhyme, but you of all people should understand my meaning in light of your easy flow between true rhyme and slant rhyme in your best work. Next, love your Michael Jackson Man in the Mirror reference. :) Favorite line: "So imperfect, so I'm perfect" You just have such a gift for seeing new words within words! Also, I always appreciate reading your thoughts as they meander through the concept of time, the future, impermanence. And there's your signature nod to the Divine--like it or not, it always shows up in your most heartfelt pieces. :) And a beautiful conclusion as always, which leads me back to the title--I love it. :) More big picture (and here I'm not sure how to word this, so please bear with my rambling thoughts), there's something I missed in my enjoyment of this poem, something of a faltering confidence that interfered with how much I usually LOVE your work. Like, I still loved it, but maybe in lowercase? :P Maybe it's just because it's shorter, and I think one of your biggest strengths in your best work is how you build momentum through several stanzas, so maybe it's just that it ended sooner than I had expected. But also, I feel like there are a lot of open-ended questions here, and I don't know that you answer all of them. Obviously, the point of those lines *is* to ask questions you don't have an answer to just yet, but it makes me wonder if maybe one of the things I have come to appreciate from your poetry that was somewhat lacking here is the answers you come up with. You tend to bring a new, insightful, status-quo-challenging perspective to old ideas in your writing, and that's a huge hook. It's what may leave me pondering a poem for days or what occasionally inspires me to send your work to a friend. It's when you say something so completely unprecedented that there is nothing coherent to answer back but "Wow." And to bring the rambling back to a semi-reasonable conclusion, perhaps it was the lack of surety and answers rather than questions that felt a touch off to me as I read. But regardless, kid, I loved it. Love, love, loved it, no doubt about it. Thanks for another gem.