heavydirtysoul; wyatt [day 1]

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W Y A T T  O ' C O N N O R

Ways to spell Wyatt O’Connor include:
Shut-out, disconsolate, and down with the blues.
Rearrange these and you’re sure to find
That not all feelings pass with time.

Twenty-four hours passed under a copper sky and the gears beneath our feet were yet to move. Anticipation crowning it all we were caught behind the minute hand, counting each off like we were truly looking forward to a certain point in time—as if that timeline was defined by single points and not the time passing in between, the last a death note of one on the infinity of it all, yet we still had the audacity to believe that one split second meant more than the passing count of another.

No one cared for funerals anyway.

Abandoned tombstones and worn out coffins—just because graveyards fill does not mean that they flourish.

Backyard graveyard and white picket fences were a definition of home I could not spell, not without one stutter too many and a falter in step I did not want to attribute to my own name. Rearrange Wyatt O’Connor and you’d find the definition of home within failure spelled so many times over that you’d lose count of the tally marks on the wall. I’d turned to scratching the ceiling because it was the same as scratching the sky, blurring one into another I would shut my eyes in the noontime sun even if it meant loss of connection with a world and the tallied boundaries it marked upon that soulless sky.

But here the sky did not burn with a brightness the sun could blind, but rather the crisp cut of copper at the edges, brass burning clouds like kindling, we could not tend to the fire without suffering the burns ourselves.

Scorched skin and screaming veins I’d stick my own hand over the flame if it meant turning from that bronze horizon. Copper cuts too close to blood, leaves a taste of iron on the tongue and disappears without a trace, leaving behind that bitter taste. Half hidden behind a hatchet heart and a smoke screen I’d considered it, held out a tentative finger to that fire and tempted the flames until they bit back. Teeth of ash biting paper skin—I was terrified of becoming the fire itself, of copper flames and brazen ash covering the surface of my skin like the waste that does not wash away.

Bathed in blood I’d die the same—no one would be there to fan the flames.

Shielded by smoke they wouldn’t see the hatchet driven through my heart, distrust bleeding through cracked veins—drowning under the weight of those eighty-four scratches on the wall is not the way I wished to go.

Pressure pounding on the presence of the powerless—a plan already put into motion by the few who rest their heels on the heads of the poor.

None of us find gain in the kill count of another.

Single digits speared through the heart of another—I will not hold the number four in my palm and wield it as a weapon because my knowledge of district six’s worthlessness does not bite any flesh but my own. Victors don’t come from district six because we have never been strong enough to realize we were slicing ourselves down to the bone.

When you’re bleeding out, the number four will not save bone or brain.

Pain flaring in my left hand, four fingers I will not wield as a weapon because the outlook will not change, not for victors, friends, or foe. Bones exposed—I am the skeleton of eighty-four scratches on the wall, carved from the pocketknife my father pressed to my palm at age thirteen—I think his intentions did not lead to my bones drying under the flame of that copper sun.

Brazen ash coats my skin and I am eyes alone, watching a world turn by while I spent the passing minutes finding every way to spell Wyatt O’Connor without the negative undertone.

Mission unsuccessful I lay a finger over the flames to tempt them like that copper sun until pain lights my nerves like a struck match and I’m bombing myself to fix the bullet holes. I was set alight by those twelve letters, yet I could spell Wyatt O’Connor in so many ways one would lose count if they didn’t mark it upon those white-washed walls.

When my father pressed a pocketknife to my palm at the age of thirteen, I wonder if he imagined his son drowning under the weight of a worthless world, with only those eighty-four scratches and twenty-four hours as brazen company.

If you try to spell Wyatt O’Connor include:
Desperate, worthless, and idiot too.
I'm sure you’ll find with the passing time,
That expiring feelings don’t end with this rhyme.