Confetti

​They call me grounded.
Composed. Calm.
Fuck you.
I am none of those.

​You see me dance, drive, drink, swipe.
I do the things.
I run the program.
But when the door locks on Unit 27,
I crawl into bed
and stay.

​The noise never stops.
Not a storm—
a dishwasher running in the dark,
a mechanical loop
churning dirty water
that cleans nothing.

​If I scratched inside my skull
you’d find the mess.
Blood.
Nails.
Confetti
from the party I’m pretending to be at.

Paper confetti.
Dry enough to spark.

​My skin burns like a trapped wildfire.
I want to explode the universe.
Go Super Saiyan.

I want to scream until the veins in my neck
rewrite the atmosphere.
I want the golden aura.
I want to level the city with a single hand
just to prove I am not empty.

A shell of skin, shields my veins,
chokes the flame back down.
Grounded.

It doesn’t fade.
It compresses.
​The heat cooks the boy into brick.
Magma cooling into obsidian.

The silence isn’t peace.
It is the sound of lava
hardening into stone.

​I turned to stone.
The stone to gravel.
And the gravel smiles
a fixed, grey grin.

​You see a solitary pedestrian
under yellow streetlights,
walking away.

You can view me.
But you never see me.

Just the statue of a scream
still buffering,
a boy-shaped space
where the light used to be.