Shameful Gaze

image credit: from Heroine magazine's PEP TALK – ISSUE 20

In Shameful Gaze, the poet confronts the unsettling intersection of self-hatred and the desperate hunger for love. The piece takes the reader through raw, visceral imagery of control, desire, and destruction, unravelling the inner conflict of a soul that both yearns for affection and recoils from its own reflection. With haunting metaphors and stark vulnerability, the poem explores what it means to feel monstrous in one’s own skin whilst still pleading—quietly and shamefully for love.

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To allow my eyes to be gouged out

So I can be blind to these sights

To see my mouth sewn shut

And feel a smile permanently stitched to my face

To lose my voice

So it feels safer to speak

To be a puppet connected to strings

To feel controlled

So I don’t fear the control that I bear

To desire

To want

To dream

But it is sickening

To the human mind

To bear such desires and wants

Fears and thoughts

Of sorrowful love

That one holds for the self

Love is the mask that this deep hatred wears

Like a second skin

Like a cold costume tightly wrapped around a heart

To give someone a blade

Sharp and metallic

And to feel it glide across your skin

Again and again

Deeply and painfully

So this love has a scar I can remember it by

To have oceans and oceans of love

Served to me on silver platters

And to consume it

Pouring whatever I see into a bottomless hole

Somewhere deep inside my soul

Just for my throat to still be raw and bloody

Just for my hands to still shake and tremble

For my eyes to weep with unshed tears

For my body to ache with silent screams

Begging,

and begging,

and begging

Silently

For more love.

Because it wasn’t enough

It never is enough

To fill this void that I have dug

This hole that stays in my body,

Empty.

The feeling of being a crimson stain

On a beautiful white scarf

Or a mouth that furls at the corners

When it fills with blood

To feel deserving of this blood

Dribbling down my mouth

To feel content retching loudly

And shamefully on air

Or on the spit that lines my tonsils and throat

To willingly stab knives into my crumbling chest

To feel,

To feel,

And just,

To feel.

And twisted am I

With such shameful desires

To explode into a million pieces

And to be torn apart and broken

Just to prove something long gone

Can still be loved for what remains.

Feeling like a beautiful flower

That chokes on its own venom

Silently

That pierces its petals with its own thorns

That appears beautiful

To be loved

And because it is fake.

And maybe,

Just maybe,

This is a monster.

A creature of shame

So much shame

Twisted, deranged, insane

It exists

It erodes

It is.

Until it isn’t

And all it is

Is a monster wrapped in a skin suit

With a borrowed identity that it clings onto

Too tightly

Because maybe,

The feeling of the skin suit wrapped around its body

Is the only embrace it will receive

And it doesn’t know if an embrace should even be cold.

It just is.

What it is.

And it exists.

Like an imposter,

An intruder,

But it reigns freely.

Still shackled

With an illusion of freedom that life gives this creature.

Maybe it was innocent.

But white things get stained easily

Just like how paper rips when it gets wet

And how too much water can make a flower drown

All it is

And all that remains

Is a sick, ugly, dirty creature

That refuses to meet its gaze in the mirror.

Disgusting.

Because even with the skin suit on,

All the creature can see in the mirror,

Is a monster.