READER’S SUBMISSION – P O E T R Y
Aye Than May
I am a murderer
An alarming claim, a nonsensical one at that too,
For the only blood on my hands is that of myself.
Yet it is not murder,
It is a correction.
I tug and tear at my skin in a hopeless search
For what used to be within me
Before my eyes were no longer mine
But that of a woman I met once in a grocery store
Eyeing my jeans with disgust and envy.
I gouged them out and gave it to the man
Who told me that the heat was no reason for immodesty,
“Cover your legs, do you not feel ashamed?”
My eyes have passed from person to person
And I am sitting on the balcony accompanying the moon, mosquito bites peppering my skin
Before a scarf is thrust into my chest
And suddenly the moon only bares me and my bare arms
And my thin shirt and my young face
Out in the open like a little lame lamb.
I am now a young man across myself, hidden well in the shadows, chuckling,
“Oh naive little one, do you not know you are only a few eyes away from disgrace?”
Eyes are the mirror to the soul.
Not portal, not path
Because mirrors only reflect what is outside
And when you look into my eyes,
What else do you expect to see
Other than yourself and your ideals, rules and morals
What lies inside is just as good as trapped, dulled
Dead with the blood dried a long time since.
May, against her best wishes, is a Class 10 student from SFX Greenherald Int’l School.