Kiran Speaks

They call us the survivors, the lucky ones

with our inability to die,

despite facing death in the mirror daily.

And so we continue to survive,

even when our hearts cry out in agony

and desperately get so close

to pulling the trigger and taking in one last breath.

We live because we don’t know how to not,

so we survive because that’s what survivors do.

They call us the survivors,

but we died a long time ago

when they pulled away our innocence

and left us to the vultures as we bled and bled.

Sometimes we would wonder how would it look

if we were bleeding on the outside.

What if the scars on our skin never healed,

like the ones we carry with us within.

They call us the survivors,

but we’re barely surviving on our own.

We think about our unmarked graves

that are nothing but an inevitability

bound to happen as the darkness

finds its leeway

and digs its rigid claws into our bones.

But we continue to survive,

because we don’t know any other way

until we can’t survive any longer.