The TEXT :

My words

My mouth is a hole of emptiness, a bottomless pit

The words I want to say get stuck in my throat and I cannot get them free

I am suffocating on the words meant for you.

They cover my throat in an allergic reaction to the emotion I hold for you

Everything I have ever said or wanted to say receding back into my mouth like a vacuum

Creating a blockage that falls further into my stomach

You tell me I am overreacting

That sends my skin into a red mess of hives

 as I find the courage to tell you what I want and how I feel

however, I cannot breathe

My anger and sadness overwhelm me and the blockage of words in my throat stop letting air out

The language I have spent years acquiring from person to person fails me

The Spanglish from my mom and the Italian from my dad

My white words and my ghetto speak

All of it fails as I try to tell you that you are wrong

I can’t

You have stolen a piece of me

You create a void in my skin and my soul as I try to fill it with my emotions

My skin has scars and ripples from your words

How you tell me to stop being different around different people

When my words are my personality, yet you take them from me on every occasion

You take them like they are chunks of my flesh and scratch out chunk after chunk

To mold me into something I am not

then beg for me to be fine

you have marred my skin yet pretend it is only paper cuts

the Rhetorical analysis:9

I wrote a poem about how my identity was feeling forgotten and erased and how that was to me. I was trying to create imagery and how I wanted my reader to understand how being silenced feels to me, how in my mind one of the worst things to happen. I wanted them to be able to feel or see at least how the skin looks/feels when it gets scratched off/out.  I wanted them to create ideas surrounding the idea of how it’s the little that makes a person. That the way I speak is a giant part of me and how I make things happen.

 Overall though I wanted it to be shown that while it seems I speak to another person, I’m speaking to myself through the poem. I find it as a message to myself to stop changing myself and stop ripping my personality from myself and how It doesn’t matter what other people like, I will always be me. I wanted my audience to be people who understand what I mean in this poem, how society makes you want to change this about yourself, and how it rarely feels as satisfying as being yourself. I wanted my audience to be my childhood bullies and show them what it felt like to be on the receiving end of their mean words. As well as people who don’t understand how much words can hurt, because sometimes a comment can hurt.

My poem would probably be on social media because that is a major platform for my intended audience, and I want to reach as many people as possible. My goal with this publishing is to find as many people as possible. I do not have an age limit for my intended audience because words hurt everyone in any age bracket. My unintended audience though is possibly teachers or public figures who have the power to repost because they have the power to use it as a source to show others. However, if social media wasn’t as big as it is I would put it in public. In public transportation like graffiti artists and paid painters put art on walls just to give It as much publicity as possible. This poem means very much to me because I’m very emotionally vulnerable the best way to convey the emotion that you want is to feel it and write from experience, and that is what I’m doing, and I want my audience to feel it too.