The Emotional Orphan

She was born with a quirk
That makes her love to hate.
Without a part of her brain she says she needs.
What is normal anyway? Who needs it?
Who is keeping score?

She names her notebook and pen Eros and Cupid.
She writes in it wearing rubber gloves,
Wearing a suit of armor claimed as a spoil of war,
There’s a wall around her heart, three sizes too big
So the love seeps in, regardless.

Life is so unfair. There’s not supposed to be any love.
Super glued into the crevices are ideas that haunt yet sustain,
Ideas about sharp points, edges, and evil ones,
Like four thumb tacks, they bind a picture of her past
To the wall around her heart, as a reminder
It will never happen again, because it will always be that way.

Her weary teenage eyes seek praise, and Validation
She rejects it, of course, because like masturbation,
it’s the only thing that truly gets her off without guilt.
Her words like music, her thoughts and feelings
Like thoughts and feelings,
Invite critique, to her it seems. Of course.

Mysteriously flawed and bad logic mistaken for fact,
unflappable ego defends, deters, and determines
vampiric qualities.
She laughs at garlic and crosses until she falls asleep at daylight.
in the casket tomb she calls her home.
Behind the blackout curtains.

Her adoring man – the mirror -
watches the peaceful face she never sees there.
It grows fuzzy until it disappears,
but he keeps it locked in his head, in his dreams.
A flower preserved, drying between two sheets,
she is a framed image etched on panes of glass.

Glass to shatter,
Glass to open out to the world, or
Glass to be bullet proof to protect her etched image.
From the silver bullet waiting,

JNV 082609
A Work Of Fictional Poetry