Lizard Skin

I wish your opinions and perspectives

were like your tattoos;

ink etched into your epidermis

pigment that survives seasons

even when the skin carrying it doesn’t.

I wish they weren’t just aesthetic statements,

like those tribal beads threaded

into oxidised, roadside jewellery;

cheap convictions you wore

the way lizards wear skin:

briefly, and only until

the weather demanded otherwise.

Because you know they aren’t you,

and you aren’t them.

You’re just a bus stop

between who you were last week

and whoever you’re auditioning to be tomorrow.

Identity, for you, was a marketplace,

and you shopped like a pickpocket:

quick hands, no conscience,

stealing anything shiny enough

to distract you from the hollow.

Years of borrowed loyalties,

rehearsed convictions,

beliefs worn only long enough

to impress a passing mirror, 

you’ve shapeshifted so often

your own shadow hesitates,

unsure which silhouette

it’s supposed to belong to.

Sometimes it doesn’t stand beside you at all.

Sometimes it waits

to see which one of you mimicries

hits the ground first.

Still, you call it victory, 

that no one caught the trick,

that you were the magic and never the misdirection.

But life has a way of watching

without ever interrupting,

the way an old audience watches a tired magician

still convinced the hat has a rabbit left.

And when the lights finally dim,

and the room refuses to applaud,

your fall won’t be a surpirse revelation,

it’ll be the only obvious, the inevitable certainty.

Because disguises aren’t armour;

they’re just countdowns in costume.

And yours has been ticking for years.

The world won’t need to expose you.

Gravity will.

Identity always collapses

exactly where the spine should’ve been.

And as you hit the ground, 

all moults cracking, all borrowed skins peeling,

you’ll finally understand

what the silence has been rehearsing for you

since the day you first lied to the mirror:

you weren’t the magic,

you weren’t even the magician;

you were the goddamn fault line, 

and collapse was never the consequence,

it was the character arc.