Literature
adolescent idols.
You with your lilac perfumes and claw-footed bathtubs, you with your pleasant gods with their ivory skin and smiling eyes, poised in golden robes, wrapped in divine light, they make you toast in the morning and bless your travels, they hold back tides, they stop traffic, you walk through life under their watchful gaze, your childhood is a talisman.
My gods are liars, cruel and iron-fisted. They left me in a field of brambles, gave me nothing but barbed wire teeth and gatling gun hands, I learned to spit and curse and fight before I could pray on bruised knees. They tested and tempered me with tragedies; I am a weapon of self-destruction they