Category: Poetry

• Lizard plays dress up

  I muck about in my ill-fitting skin.

  I grind my jawbone into grit. 

  I waft and I waver, and I wait and I wait. 

  My scaly shoulders suffer in the thick air. 

  It’s putrid, even rancid; every inhale burns. 

  I can’t stay here. 

  I make it halfway down the road,

  I let out a chilling scream then, and turn around.

  My sandpaper tongue probes the spaces between the dentin of my teeth.

  I lick the sediment from my gums and I wait and I seethe. 

  Oh, this alien skin. 

  I grimace, spitting out sawdust remnants. 

  The first scale has sloughed off and hangs suspended halfway down my back. 

  I am reptilian. I am panicking, and wishing for the grace that I lack. 

  A quick glance around, but I no longer care who sees. 

  I unzip this human suit, step out. 

  No, I step in. To myself. To me.

  April 26, 2025

  feedback welcomed, human beings, me, mental-health, pain, poem, poet but didn’t know it, Poetry, prose, self-reflection, uncomfortable in your skin, writing

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