old catacombs.

I feel like a catacomb.
I feel like there are a million tombs inside me
with a thousand secrets each
and I don’t know how to navigate the tunnels.

I’m not always the saddest of cemeteries;
people leave flowers sometimes.
I’ve never been to visit a grave before, but I imagine
it’s no one’s favorite thing to do.
Although some people plant flowers in my heart,
others stumble across something they can’t bear to face.

It’s like I have a few particularly large vaults hidden in the recesses of my bones
and they contain the darkest of any secrets.
In graveyards, vaults hold the bones of a dead body
and in my bones
vaults hold the memories of the past.

In me, my vaults are filled with decisions
and hurts and preferred-to-be-forgotten memories.
I rarely unearth them, my subterranean chambers
of aged clandestine intent.
Unearthing them is like digging up the body
and not many stick around to help me
lift the heavy weight.

I don’t mean to have secrets;
they just sort of appear.
As soon as someone makes it known how much
disdain or fear or hatred or perhaps just uncomfort
that they have for something,
it seems part of me sets to work to
bury that piece of me as deep as possible.

So I bury the struggles and the ugly pieces and the rotting bones;
I bury them like the dead, six feet deep and
please don’t visit.
Because no one wants to see those things.

I’m so ashamed of my tombs and what they hold that
I can’t think of a person I can go to in order to help me clean them out.
It’s not like I want to lock up the dead things inside my bones;
I just don’t know where else to put them,
lest they spill out of my mouth before me in a waterfall of unpoetic words,
making a fool of me.

I don’t think my problem is having too many hurts.
I think that I believe that being hurt is to be weak
and I think I don’t want to seem weak, so although I want help for the hurt,
if anyone knows how hurt I am, how many hurts I hold inside me,
they would know how weak I am,
therefore I would be weak and hurt and I don’t have a lot of experience in people sticking around for that much of a mess.

Or maybe I do know someone who would stick around for that much of a mess,
but I won’t give Him a chance, cause that’s one of the hurts buried in my bones.