Sage Passos: Three Poems

Paper Dolls

We are strung up like paper dolls, cut in stenciled shapes are fates preset before our birth certificate was ever written, by society’s lies and lover’s mistakes. Chains are made with expectations of perfection, and mistakes are cut from the line, some were crinkled, others were torn, some were merely a little different.

And that was all it took to snip them from the line leaving them abandoned with a concept of perfection that taints their mind, as they are discarded like waste till they can adjust to what they should have been. With minds like nails, stabbing them with headaches and painful thoughts the rust tainting their mind so as the wounds heal, scars are left damaging the soul well after because if the nail didn’t kill, the infection will finish the job. Crumple them up, they will never be the same, each new line, tear, or heartless fold, leaves damage that can not be undone and spins them into an ongoing catalyst into causing more wounds. Because once claimed broken you will never think you are fixed till the world tells you your fixed. But the scissors will come back, once again ready to snip you off, someone always will, for the most minute difference, miniscule flaw, you will be removed.

You are left to flutter into darkness where there is no real cure for the tainted soul you harbor, for the rust has settled and you do not remember the color you once were. If someone were to ask you numbers you’d know but if someone’s ask the beauty in one’s self the forged appearance of perfection would break once again revealing the crumpled soul of a paper doll cut free not from perfection, but from beauty, a paper doll who was once a person who thought that this world was full of color only to see the blank slate of the paper they was grafted from android everything turns to hues of gray, and the world turns bleak. A world where we are more accepted as a beautiful funeral, then a self confident life.

We are not allowed to love ourselves. We are more accepted filled with demons reminding us of the judgements we face not only in death but in the livelihood of the planet we have been placed on. We are possessed by words and phrases of passer-bys reminding us of the humans we once were but now we are nothing more than thin paper sheets strung up for the pickings. We are only important if we fit the cookie cutter mold set up by the people before us, telling us we’re to blame for the societal settings of today. Doing nothing to help the children born of thoughts of an apocalypse in a world they expected to raise them up, but the footholds and foundations had crumbled. There is nothing left for them but dying hopes and expectations.

To the paper dolls, with tears caused by the rusting of their essence.

To the paper dolls, with scissors snipping away parts of their nature

To the paper dolls, with holes caused by the vicious nature of the tools before

Cheers, for another day has passed, and we are still held together by the staples, of other broken heart wishing to fix their fallen siblings adopted from the rubble of a life so cold and unforgiving that individuality is worth a death sentence.

Long live the mistakes

*

Butterfly Boxes

The things in life so simple and small, lead lasting impacts, changing effects a butterfly paradox and you wonder how many lives you’ve changed. When you are hit with the reality that everyone around you has their own lives and you are nothing but a background noise to someone else’s song you wonder what melodies you can make from the harmonies you left behind. All it takes is a misplaced footstep, a fallen book, a forgotten memory. Do you ever really cease to exist? What about the memories you lost but someone else kept locked tight in a box of precious gems? The most defining part of your personality could be a figment of your imagination and your soul is expressed in ways you never conceived in your head. I question the reality of touch, but touching people’s hearts is a value of unfathomable strength. To change a person’s mind is to change the course they’ve been on, and the longer they’ve been walking down that path the harder it is to turn around and double back. At some point you decide you’ve gone so far without a map, what’s the point of going back to square one. Think outside the box right? But that box is our starting point. We were never meant to stay in it, humans are not squares, but what is the harm to returning to that box and trying again?

*

Game Over

I remember when I was younger, when life was a simple routine of day-to-day living. When nap time and snack times defined our existence. We did not worry about depression, or politics, or war. All we saw was naive happiness until our playgrounds turned to checkerboards and we were nothing more than chips being picked off one by one, simply in the way of another person’s dream. Everyone tried to last and reach the other side just to be crowned as another king, not caring who they sacrificed to achieve it in the mad scramble to be considered someone important. But then checkers turned to chess, where there is only one king who you fight for, and only one for which you oppose whether you want to or not. Of course on this chessboard, there are some who may rank higher, worthy to be beside the king, but most of us are nothing but lowly pawns manipulated for the sake of a game we never wanted to play. And just because some were higher, mounting trusty steeds of horsepower, rather than a true colt, or the rooks that built their mansion walls far too high, this didn’t mean they were free of the reign of a self centered king. It didn’t matter who fell as long as the king reigned.

Though maybe sometimes, it wasn’t chess, maybe we spend our free days scraping our knees as we fell down shoots, and spraining our wrists in a desperate attempt to climb higher on ladders, only to slip down below everyone else the next turn. Or maybe we rule a fake world where we can own fake everything with fake dollars and forget about what really matters. Or maybe we shove people behind us just to get ahead, thinking a simple “Sorry” can fix it. But it doesn’t. Our sprained wrists will never heal, our fake dollars can never make us happy, and that “Sorry” doesn’t heal the damage you left behind because you had both eyes on the prize, and none on your heart.

So we played and played and played every game till boredom overtook and we chose to move on to a different game, with different pieces leaving a wake of unfinished chaotic destruction behind us. But we never look back because to us, it’s just a game. In this world we fight to be kings, and kings fight to be gods, never realizing they are no god, but rather another devil, playing to cheat, playing to steal, playing to lie, playing to win. They repeat the same thing over and over, but never receive the result they desire. They tear the boxes of board game apart yet wonder why the pieces left, but throw away what ever is left in there to rot. They may wonder why it is that this happens, but the blame never is on them. They would never accuse themselves for their domino kingdoms falling, or would label people as cheaters just because they don’t want to believe they lost. They let the weighted dice roll, assuming they have the right to abuse what people believe in, if it gets them their way. So they slip by, the jester of the deck, thinking they’re an ace, checkmating your final move, earning snake-eyes once again. All by lying. So in the end, they will have played and won it all. They reach their goal but look back and realize that there is nothing more for them. They don’t have any games to play anymore and they face the reality they weren’t playing at all. So while they find themselves as the devil of destruction, all they here are two words:

“Game Over”

What are you looking for?