My Colors Do Not Match

I have a smile, stolen from the magenta girl

All bubbles and fake laughter

Hidden behind genuine intentions

Cut away piece by piece with acrylic red children’s scissors

Bright like her bubblegum lipstick

She didn’t use it right anyways

I have perfect teeth, plucked from the blue walls of my orthodontist’s office

Clattering with fear of what lurks below the murky waters

A television screen on loop

Navy depths only illuminated by the occasional flash of orange

A useless controller held in my hands

Tying me to it’s rolling surface

A lifesaver raft made of grey

The grips torn off and worn down by the clambering maw of hands below me

I have chipped nails, dutifully duplicated from the man I dreamt so long of emulating

Yellowed with twisting, spirals of smoke

A sickly sweetness absorbed into my lungs.

Alveoli twitch, nicotine advancing icteric over the blues and reds of my veins

The doctor doesn’t recommend it

But since when has he ever listened to his own advice anyways?

I have purple hair

Forcibly ripped from the walls of my childhood bedroom

Begged for over and over again

It never wavered

An unending presence of royalty

That I wear as a crown

I have green skin

Cut piece by piece

From plants in the yard

Adorned with bright bursts of perennials

Each plucked and tucked into a wreath

Under the recommendation of my mother

But she did not see

Each yellow dandelion

I weaved among the vines

I have an orange chest

Filled with bright, Monarchs

Carefully borrowed from a public library

Stored in the pages of books on butterflies

And other things that can transform themselves with time

I seek solutions to why I am this way

Be not afraid

The answer whispers in my ears

Stereo in all its surrounding glory

Eyes and wings beating louder than the pulse thrumming in my skull

A monster worse than I

Yet somehow holier than any man could hope to be

I get three Hail Marys for my sins

And four for daring to think

That the pure white of my altar robes

Would ever be better tie-dyed from the ink bleeding off my skin

But I whisper instead of prayer:

”Father, forgive them

For they do not know what they are doing

Or who they hate“

I have a brown saint’s bone

Packed prettily in a glass container

Weighing me down with every step

A shining centrifuge of an altar

Spins painting me in colors I do not see

It’s a talisman for those who do not believe in talismans

Protection in the form of necromancy

Ancient and as long forgotten

As the shining stone that beats in my chest

It’s another person that I have collected a piece of

Litearly

And stored within my very being

Or in the pocket of my jeans.

I am a rainbow, in no particular order.

A cacophony of colors

A symphony out of key and clashing

Philharmonic only in a name I sing from my own lungs

Tight with anticipation

Parallel to the orchestra strings

Tremolo in fear of exposing the pieces of myself I have chosen

Carefully curated from a charcuterie board of humans lain before me

And certainly those to come

My stitches are made from memories

Each a connection

A moment shared that cannot be duplicated

Hand-stitched into the fibers of my very being

I am mutilated against God’s image

Desecrating my temple with the refractions of undeniable humanity

But didn’t God perform surgery first?

Creating life from the broken, ivory rib of his image

Taking His place, I cut Adam’s chest open again

My scalpel silver and impersonal

And like a toddler already wretched with greed

I reach inside

My heart is a philanthropist’s stone

A prism

that took what was once so pure and bright

And refracted it into an uncontrollable ultraviolet array

That piece of me has since been crushed to dust

and molded back together

With grey mud and black tar

A patchwork cartography still being devised

I have a body

Made up of many pieces.

Crafted by God

Or maybe me.

The two get confusing.

I am Mary Shelley’s homunculus of a monster

Built from pieces of

Each and

Everyone I’ve met

I wonder what pieces of others

Whom I will never meet

Those around me see in

My smile, teeth, nails

Hair, skin, chest

Or heart

I am an abomination.

And I’ll be damned

If I’m not

Proud of that