3 POEMS
Zarria Jenkins
NAKED
You ask me, who are you really?
I take off my shirt
Why do I do the things I do?
My bra
What made me like this?
My pants
What have I been through?
My socks
Now I stand before you
In my last line of defense
Before you see the real me
Before I have nothing left to hide
Not behind and not beneath
Naked
And then you finally asked me,
Do you love yourself?
So now I stand before you
Fully exposed
You know me inside and out
But here I am still fully clothed
Yet you have just seen all of me
Having someone know you in that way
Will leave you vulnerable
As if you were naked
WHAT COULD BE
It’s what could be what should be
that makes me happy
I fell for possibility
now I’m in love with our potential
I’m in love with what I made you
not who you are
I realize my mistake
but I don’t think I can handle
who’s behind the mask I carved
I can’t accept that I’m in love with a stranger
TO THE GOOD
To the good,
what if I don’t want to be the hunter or the prey?
To the hurricanes who thought that they were storms,
you feared yourselves and so hid inside and destroyed your homes.
To the procrastinators,
ignoring it won’t make it go away but we’ll deal with the storm when it gets here.
To the broken promises,
the star that I wished on burned out.
To the fragile,
you’re bent until you’re broken and you’re broken until you’re shattered.
To the merry-go-round,
I want to get away but you always take me to the same place.
To the smokers,
if you always have your head in the clouds, then you need somebody down to earth
to keep you grounded.
To the eternal internal war,
the civil strife within the body loses the same,
my peace of mind being the only reoccurring casualty,
a piece of my heart allied with my feelings.
To the mirror girl,
I’m tired of making the same mistake with the same mistake,
same heartbreak with my own choice of pain,
done picking my poison. It kills me all the same.
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