She Paints Herself
by Imani Ortiz

Note: Poet Warriors write with truth and purpose; this poem contains strong language, graphic details and/or sensitive subject matter.

She paints herself as she thinks they see her in her eyes.

She can’t see her soul but recognizes what lies within her; the lies she’s told herself a dozen times that she thinks are true but fails to realize that her herself is the beauty of everything.

Her mind has been brainwashed from those eyes watching what they want her to see so they can take her culture, the way she thinks, and everything that makes her her in the real form of reality.

Mocking her and making her into costumes that they adore and she accepts it and tells herself shes a whore…

She accepts and embraces the falseness they’ve laid upon her and shes completely lost and confused.

No guidance to help her so she goes and exposes her beautifully, sculpted canvas to see if they actually care.

Her hearts been broken and stitched over and over with the weak thread of other men’s betrayal who weaved her into their bed of lustfulness, but yet she looks at herself and still paints herself as she thinks they see her in her eyes.

Her pure, fragile walls have been bombarded and bombed to be destroyed and left to ruins at her feet. Her only private sense of security that she had always respected and has but now had been proud of.

She’s completely uncomfortable with herself but demands herself to be comfortable with whatever she does at a moments notice, doing that forces her to forget what the word ‘comfortable ‘ actually felt like.

She’s afraid and terrified not even knowing that the word confident had existed.

She’s been beaten with words and killed with physical attraction.

Now she has no voice that’s audible enough to even reach above a whisper.

But she acts like everyone else that’s not herself and keeps continuing to paint herself as she thinks they see her in her eyes.

Her tears flow into forms of rivers and streams, binding into oceans of disparity.

Although she’s connected to strength from the roots she can easily be swept away and drowned to death.

No one knows how she really felt and no one ever asks, but just assumes all the time and walks past her like she’s invisible.

She already feels like she’s inconceivable to live on a planet where killing, hatred, backstabbing, lying, unconditional lust and any other possible thing there is to break somebody down and make them feel wrong and like they aren’t doing enough.

She can say she loves but she can hate more than anything in the world.

Hate was what was taught first and love was self taught last and she only knows but how to go by one with her life and the choices she makes.

The unbearable likeness of being a human is exactly the opposite; the accepted use of being gone.

And she knows that that is the worst feeling in the world but still she accepts and continues to paint herself as she thinks they see her in her eyes.