Oh, did I hurt your feelings? Did I take a surplus of the average Gothic/emo kid/angsty teen, earn their trust by making up a few stories and gothic poems? Here, let’s relive the experience:

• Fact: You trusted a stranger on the internet
• Fact: You said nothing about the “gothic_boi666” label I put on myself
• Fact: You all liked the poems that were meant to suck
• Fact: You are all similar in your “suffering”
• Fact: Cutting yourself can only hurt you more
• Fact: The people who “insulted” me acted like catalysts, and were in on the joke the whole time
• Fact: You are all teenagers with “problems”
• Opinion: You all have problems. They aren’t major problems, but you think they are, and cry for attention because in your life everything was going your way until something changed, and now you don’t like it. Stop crying for attention, nobody really cares, and everybody thinks your poetry sucks, which doesn’t really mean it does, but you apparently don’t know.

Look, I did this as a cruel joke at first, but then it became an experiment. And it succeeded. You are all subjects of this experiment whether you like it or not. I don’t know why you bother complaining about labeling, you all join xanga blogrings. These are for similarly minded people. At first, I was just going to attract the attention of the people in the “Awaiting a justfull death” blogring, but then I went to the “c|u|t|t|i|n|g is my anti-drug” blogring. I commented, and you all gathered on my “gothic_boi666” site.

You are all horrible contradictions of yourselves. You say not to label each other, and yet you join the xanga blogrings, where you are automatically labeled by the blogring name. In acting, I was a better goth/emo kid than any of you. What I mean by that is that I didn’t allow myself to be labeled by joining blogrings, I wrote about my horrible life, and not about troubles with my “girlfriend,” and I didn’t brag about how I cut myself (which I don’t).

Why do you “cutters” post online about how you cut? Nobody really cares. This is a desperate cry for attention, especially when you want everybody to know. Why do you other xanga bloggers post about problems at home? Again, nobody cares. Sure, there are people who pretend they care, and even people who convince themselves they care, but they really don’t.

• Fact: There are thousands if not millions of people who use xanga
• Fact: at least a thousand of those people are Goths, emo kids, and angsty teenagers
• Fact: you are in no way unique
• Fact: out of the twenty of your friends and fifty strangers who comment on your xanga account, about ten of them will really care about your personal life

Please, tell me how you felt about this. E-mail me at Silent_shadow159@hotmail.com, or MSN message me at the same address. You could try my aim account: Xilentshadow, but I’m rarely on.

No poetry today, sisters and brothers. I would like to share a bit about myself with you.

I spent most of my life in fear as my father beat my mother, and I sat in the closet and hid. I still have memories of my father yelling at my mother for doing the smallest things wrong. I remember once when she spilled coffee on his lap. He yelled “You spilled my coffee you fucking bitch!” and started choking her.

These images haunt me now. After both of my parents got into a car accident involving drunk driving, I was put up for adoption, because I had no other family. The orphanage was horrible. Bigger kids beat me up a lot, just for the cruel fun of it. One day I was adopted however. My new(er) parents didn’t yell at each other- they yelled at me. Now if I do something wrong, they scream at me, and send me to my room, which is in the warm attic upstairs.

I used to sneak out of the house at midnight and dwell with the others outside, but time has changed, and such things are cut off in my life. I found a poetry book inside the attic one day, with published works of Edgar Allen Poe. Some of these were disturbing, but I’ve seen much worse, so I continued reading.

With my elementary and middle school education, and with the fact that I read anything I can get my hands on, I started writing my own poetry- the ones you see here are mine.

You may be wondering how I have access to the internet. Well, I don’t visit my own home much anymore, and my adoptive parents don’t really look for me. I stay with a friend of mine, already out of college. I’ve taken up a gloomier look, and started cutting myself. He put a stop to that, however.

Slender beams of illumination enter
this darkened prison as I kneel,
always silent, always a slave,
frozen here,
waiting.

Angelic forms wrought in panes of glass loom as
dust dances in the air,
forming an image in my mind,
penetrating my naked flesh.

Blood on a child's face.

I raise my head, now crying out for
this oblivious darkness.