The soft edge of the blade piercing my skin
The quiet pitter patter of crimson on porcelain
The scene fades to black
It is not the end
Just the projection of my thoughts
Consuming
But empty

Like the voices that whisper in my ears when I’m alone
Telling me I’ve got no place
No friends
No purpose
The internal screams in the silence of my room
That deafening silence
It’s worse than feeling alone in a room of people
“They hate you,” the voices spit
“They’re all talking bad about you,” they hiss

These thoughts get bottled up and locked below layers of gates
Disguised as smiles
For them to get out they would have to escape the cave of my throat
Then cross the bridge of my tongue
Slip through the gaps in the fence of my teeth
And leap of the soft edges of my lips
And one day they may
Unless I stop these thoughts first.
If I can silence them
If I can end them, before they can end me-
But there lies the problem
They are me
And to silence these thoughts is to silence myself
So I open the gates and lower the bridge
And the thoughts gleefully escape in the form of jokes
And roaming thoughts
But the message is there
And people will catch on
So in the end I guess I have to silence these thoughts
By first silencing myself.

-Zach Martin