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

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  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.