"Beauty, Part 3" by Carvens Lissaint (inspired by Mega)

He said
Hey yo, fat ass, yo, biggie mcfatfat, yo, you so fat, I'm gonna blow all the motherf*cking fat people up on one island and make a big ass bowl of chunky soup.

He said
you so black you gotta eat oreos with some white gloves.

He said
you so fat it look like you got two midgets in a headlock.

Oh he said you ain't have no nipples.

She said, I mean, Carvens, I mean like, you're handsome and everything but like I mean like, you're like my brother, we can't...

She said
OMG how did you get your skin that color?

She said
She said
You know what? This is what she said.
I swear to god this is what she said.
She was like Carvens, you're so ugly you should kill yourself.

He said
how do you stop black people from coming to your house? You hang one in the front.

He said
yo fatass I want you to have a stroke from you running up those steps.

She said you should kill yourself.

And when I was in the fifth grade, I wrote a suicide note.

That was the first time, I believe, someone loved my writing.

In the fourth grade, my valentine told me that I couldn't be seen with her because all the kids might actually think she liked me.

In third grade I ate lunch by myself
every day.

In the second grade
a kid punched me in my mouth at the end of recess.

Two of my teeth fell to the pavement
I laid on the ground, blood spilling from my lips for fifteen minutes before anyone asked if I was okay.

In the first grade, a white girl at snack time told me that my skin looked I never took a shower, she's never seen something so black.

In kindergarten, I was the only student who stood awake
during nap time.

You know, feeling alone is not foreign to me.

In the classroom, children spoke the harsh language of tear gas
I cried in more bathroom stalls than I can remember learning

My bullies were swastickas dressed in Catholic school uniforms

The machete eyes,
the machete eyes of my peers would carve smiles out of my face like a jack-o-lantern

They always needed an overweight, dark-skinned target to dart through,
a pinata to hang in the nucleus of the playground while each kid took a swing.

I learned how to hate myself
at such an early age.
I wrote "God doesn't love me" on the inside of all of my notebooks

I would pray, every night, to be a superhero, asking anyone who watched over me
if they could grant me the power of invisibility
so I could vanish off the face of humanity
each time my confidence was steamrolled to the concrete

You know
My freshman year of high school
my stomach and muffin top was so big I could barely see my feet
I used to breathe like a coughing motor cycle

My sophomore year
I wanted a girlfriend so bad
I used to practice making out with the mirror
just so it would be perfect when I finally fell in love

My junior year
I grew a foot taller,
I lost 30 pounds but still was heavy with self-consciousness

My senior year I was the most popular kid in school but still saw a sea of faces cackling at me whenever I turned my back

My freshman year of college I started having sex with women in the hopes to find
myself in the museum of their pelvis
so gyrate my hips under the bodies of their sweat and of temples crashing
I used to pound bodies into the spine of mattress
screaming at the top of my lungs
what's my name
just so they could remind me who I was

Depression

Depression

Depression
can drive humans to very hollow places

Places where flocks of vultures lurked in the things I found beautiful
and I often asked myself

Am I beautiful?
Am I worth glancing at twice?
Can anyone love me as much as I love God?
Does everything really happen for a reason
or am I just some laughing stock
of this inside joke the whole world is in on but me.

It took almost two decades of living on this earth
to finally love myself.

If you only knew,
If you only knew how hard is was to write this poem

How hard it is to embrace every stretch mark like a life line when I feel dead inside

To say, to say that my skin color is a shade of armour that can never be bruised
to say, to say that my smile is a page of the bible
that my face is a halo that spent its entire life basking in the sun

I learned how to love my weakness
I wear my insecurities like a good suit to a job interview

I'm awkward, I'm awkward, I'm awkward, I'm awkward
And I love it

I make a fool of myself

I make a fool of myself
but still have the confidence of a firefly buzzing in the gut of a cave

I cry
I cry
and I fight and I cry and I fight and I cry, I cry and I fail and I fall and
I get the f*ck back up.

I,
I'm no longer afraid to stumble,
to fall flat on my face and look around like nothing happened
to turn the center stage into a playground

Have you all looked at me, lived in my own skin, and wake up every morning
look deep into the mirror and say you know what,
you know what Carvens, I love you
I love you so much
And you are beautiful.

..................................

Another beautiful video poem is "Bullies Called Him Pork Chop" over on Upworthy.com.