Ghosts

I look in the mirror

And I see ghosts swimming in my eyes

Phantoms of futures left unlived

Specters of mes I could have been

Most of them were murdered

By words instead of weapons

The killers varied

Scattered through my life

My father killed that one

With words I wasn’t mean to hear

That one there was stabbed

By the boy who first hurled the slur

This one fell by my mother’s hand

After my first coming out

This one died at twenty

Stabbed with the words “just us”

By the first hope at love I had

Others were passive suicides

Death by choices that I made

Resulting in the me

That stares at them in their graves

There are countless others

Dead by other hands

By friends who left

Teachers who meant well

Even strangers on the street

So many lives I could have lived

So many paths untrod

I don’t let anyone else see those ghosts

I hide them all the time

Keep my haunted eyes averted

When someone gets too close

I’m afraid of what they’ll say

If they look beyond the iris

Because words could be the killer

If I let somebody see

If I let somebody know

The ghosts are lurking there

The odds are they will kill me too

And I’ll be yet another ghost

Swimming in the eyes

Of the next me that will come