Lightning in My Teeth

 

Lightning in My Teeth
Just a short fuse spitting blue in the dark of my chest,
a live wire thrashing wild inside a cracked glass jar.
Skin stretched too tight over the storm caged in my ribs,
eyes drilling through dead-end walls toward horizons licked with fire.
I burned to rip loose from this ordinary, suffocating life,
leave only scorched earth where my old self used to stand. No groveling “Yes, sir,” no spine snapped in half,
no obedient shadow folded into their plastic mold.
They shoved me into a dim foyer chair,
slapped a dog-eared number in my palm like a chain.
But lightning already snarled and sparked between my teeth—
I was the blinding flash the sky never saw coming. Back then classrooms buzzed with laughter sharp as shattered glass,
while I hunched in the corner carving empires from crumpled paper scraps.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” they sneered, lips curled cruel,
dreaming of stadiums and screaming crowds under blinding lights?
They branded me basic, called me easy, forever second-best,
said I’d ride shotgun forever in someone else’s reckless race.
Now the stage erupts in white-hot glare around me, sweat gleaming like stars,
I grin beneath the roaring flood while you clap from the nosebleeds,
drowned in the cheap-seat dark.