This is not me.
I am not an image.
This is not me.
I stand for nothing but myself.
This is not me.
But I am angry.
I am a person
I was strong.
And if while I am on the phone to another a bullet tears into my chest, piercing my breast, splintering the bone of my ribcage as it passes into my lungs and into the flesh of my back,
And I fall back,
I will die.
For simply being somewhere.
The blood will run from my eyes.
You can not repress that.
As it engulfs me.
People will watch it
again and again
again and again.
But that was not me,
that body, those surprised, those hurt eyes, dying.
It is not me you are watching, feeling as though you are losing someone.
My life was more than its last five minutes.
You are wrong if you think you are stronger than me.
I was just there.
I am not one thing.
I am not you in another situation.
I -
I am not an image.
This is not me.
I stand for nothing but myself.
This is not me.
But I am angry.
I am a person
I was strong.
And if while I am on the phone to another a bullet tears into my chest, piercing my breast, splintering the bone of my ribcage as it passes into my lungs and into the flesh of my back,
And I fall back,
I will die.
For simply being somewhere.
The blood will run from my eyes.
You can not repress that.
As it engulfs me.
People will watch it
again and again
again and again.
But that was not me,
that body, those surprised, those hurt eyes, dying.
It is not me you are watching, feeling as though you are losing someone.
My life was more than its last five minutes.
You are wrong if you think you are stronger than me.
I was just there.
I am not one thing.
I am not you in another situation.
I -
2 comments:
Gorgeous, stirring poem.
But - at the risk of being immensely irritating - you need to lose the apostrophe in "it's" in the last stanza...
Sorry, pedantry kicking in (maybe I should change careers and write subtitles for a living; I heard you need to be anal in that profession!).
Just think it spoils the sense of the last verse if you're confused by the punctuation at that point and it's too striking a poem to let it be spoilt! x
Aha! Thanks very much :-) always up for hearing when they slip through the net. Should be nice and fixed now.
And I totally thought of you in the subtitling talk, totally did.
^_^ x
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