Poets Anonymous Ink: A Tornado, An Artist, & a Storm

They used to call me a tornado (but uttered it like it was a compliment).

I wasn’t the cyclone.

It was the world that spun around me.

I used to spin in circles because it fucked with my equilibrium and that was an addiction as a kid – looking for kicks when abandoned by society.

All this probably sounds dramatic, but I am a poet and our words are worth more than your sapphires and garnets.

She taught me to stop spinning by telling me I was

killing brain cells.

(This was after she already told me that I was half-genius, half developmentally-disabled. & I believed her because what would she gain by

feeding me lies.)

I was chaos and a storm because I didn’t understand life’s tempo. Always out of rhythm. My lines didn’t rhyme. My step didn’t match.

(And as a child, all I wanted was to be normal.)

I never saw myself as beautiful. Just an oddity.

I thought myself an alien (maybe home was a galaxy beyond ours). Maybe I was not meant to exist on a planet with this much oxygen.

All I knew was each day, it was getting harder to breathe & everyone expected me to conform.

Some girls don’t fit the mold. Some aren’t sugar & spice & all things nice.

Some are made of hurricane winds, curious minds, & licks of fire.

(Some are an arsonist’s fantasy and a meteorologist’s nightmare.)