I am a paper doll, an easy target.
Nothing about me has substance.
I am all broken promises and empty hands.
I am a wound with nothing to show for it.
People take swings at me in the dark because I let them.
I do not fight back anymore.
I have no strength left to block blows.

Fists collide hard against my jaw, shattering all my teeth.
I spit them out into my open palms.
I used to take them with pride,
I cleaned them off, and
I displayed them for the world to see.
I framed every rejection letter, but
now I am running out of space to hang them up on my wall.

I was taught to accept my failures.
I put my shortcomings on stage and
watched them squirm under spotlights like toddler ballerinas
clunky and awkward
trying to make their bodies flow the way the other girls do,
trying to be swans but amounting to nothing but ugly ducklings.

I am an ugly duckling.
I am the mangled body they pulled out of the wreckage.
I am handfuls of broken bones and bruised skin,
and I am not ashamed of it.
My body has become a canvas for all the low blows of the universe.
Color is spattered over me, sunsets of orange fading into black and blue.
I am an empty casket.
Only the shell remains of something you may have once loved.
The rest has already rotted away.
I am gone

I have learned to accept these facts.
I am nothing of substance.
I tried to storm.
I tried to make myself into something meaningful
even if it meant destruction.
But I am just drizzle.
I am a speed bump on someone else’s road to significance.
I am everything you are afraid of becoming:
small and empty.
Quiet and meaningless:
I am a notebook full of poems that no one will read.

It’s not that I lost my flame.
I never had a light at the start.
I am accepting these facts.
I have accepted my fate as a tribute to mediocrity.
I will achieve nothing
because it is not worth trying.
It is not worth failing anymore.
It is not worth the bruising.

I accept that I am nothing.
I accept that I can be nothing.
No one ever told me that this was an option,
but it must be.
It must be
because when I stick out open palms
I only ever come back with broken fingers.
This must be an option.
I am not failing.
I just refuse to give anyone the satisfaction
of watching me try
and then surrender.