It''s the feeling you''re out of sorts


    Inherent, deep-rooted, and burning in your guts


    Except you, with your swaying gait, don''t even know what you should be chasing


    The blurry light at the end of a collapsing tunnel


    The salvation everyone seems to have an image of.


    You''d listen, quietly, to the variations of it


    Said with a wistful smile, a shuddering breath, a running tear, a prideful grin


    You''d listen, quietly, and realise that, no


    They don''t know either. Clueless as you are.


    Except your cluelessness seems to be a bigger sin than theirs


    Trailing behind you in flickering streets


    Staining the words that bubble out of you into something mean


    They don''t know either, so why is your ignorance bound to such extremes?


    The sky rumbles every night, watching you cry into it with open hands


    It is displeased with your act of pleading, you are too.


    Your ignorance of the human ways seldom lets you go of its touch


    Something scalding at the tips of your quivering fingers


    A clear warning to the other ones.


    You listen, quietly, and bury your fingers in hiding


    With a cold, pulsing ache, you paste a faint smile


    Waiting for the descriptions to end.


    You have never used the words rolling over their tongues


    Familiar, practised, and almost horrifying to hear


    Like you have been sure to miss something, some things, just by the act of your birth.


    You listen, quietly, with venom bubbling behind teeth


    Lashing in silence at the sated eyes of ones not in debt


    Your ignorance stacks the odds against you, each a hefty price, waiting and waiting and waiting


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    While your ears are filled with dreamy tones


    The colours of an open sky, the rumbling of a human voice.


    What is different, you wonder, eyes tracing and hands drawing blood


    What is so wholly, awfully, drastically different in the map of your soul


    That it only ever leads to ruins?


    Nothing buried under the sand, except the things you pushed into the earth with hot tears


    An almost inhuman wailing, a repeated wish, bones of your own covered by the grains of a grave well-loved.


    The fury of a not-quite-human is quite horrible to bear.


    The envy it plants, engraved in the small beginnings of you, snarling and scratching and screaming at the ease of the others


    Why not me? A reoccurring whisper, trembling on its way to the sky


    Why not me? A defeated flag, raised with the sounds of a hundred thunders


    The pictures drawn with a kind brush turn into droning in the back of your head


    Persistent, so persistent, you bite back tears and cover it with a curse.


    The ringing of unlikeness burrows into your hollow bones


    Vibrating, shaking, listening with crazed eyes


    A hysterical laugh stuck in your throat, waiting until the paint dries into something you wish to tear.


    The humour of the colours making up your walls rarely escapes you


    A crooked mask of a thing, a clown silent in front of a laughing crowd, a blaring, perfect knife to the heart.


    You are made up of spite and little else.


    A sardonic quirk of lips, hiding gritted teeth


    An idiot late on most accounts, faulting the world for falling at the seams.


    Your garden holds what you bury with little affair


    Every space you tear open is only slightly different than the rest veiled


    An ugly green rapidly fading in front of your dripping treasures


    A mess of sand, stones, bones, and marrow.


    The versions you bury witness the undoing of you


    Each moment a different soul


    The quiet one you buried with echoing screams


    The smiling one you spit into the earth, bile on your tongue


    An angry, biting thing suffocated with bloodied hands


    A gentle, loving facade mercilessly torn and thrown into a void


    The rest of you, the whole of you


    Is always buried in your bones.


    You are failure and nothing else


    Every try tucked in your chest


    We will learn


    But you will not


    Each time a new flaw pulls at your guts


    We will learn


    But you will not


    Each brush you hold only ever results in things better untold.


    The smiling idiot, wondering about the steps they should fill


    Did they miss a class, a summary, something vital in them?


    The gallows call for their ignorance


    Each blood spilled making way for another failure


    They stopped listening a while ago


    When the tones turned biting and cold


    Staring at the distant sky, watching it fill the hollowed earth


    Why me?


    Nothing ever answers.