Speechless

 I don’t remember signing up for this.
I don’t know who made you the authority on what it means to be pretty. Or where you get off going around talking trash about girls who kissed like you were the best thing they’d ever had.
And you can barely dress yourself,
so I don’t know who made you
judge and jury of the beauty pageant,
because, guess what?
I’ve met your ex-girlfriend.
And she’s really pretty. And, far as I know, she dumped your ass, and I think I’m staring to get why that is.
What I wanna know is who made this a contest, and what, exactly, is the prize?
You?
Listen carefully.
Don’t you dare love me through the blood of the girls who came before me.
If you can’t love me without taking the knife to someone else,
I’d rather you didn’t love me
at all.
There is a war going on right under our noses.
A war that we are all complicit in.
I know.
Because I have wielded the ax
just as surely as I have been
cut down by it–
there is blood in the streets
and no one wants to talk about it.
So the red on your shoes
and the red on my hands,
it all goes unnoticed.
This is the ongoing war
of woman against woman,
and say what you want,
but women weren’t the ones who started it. I didn’t learn the word slut
from my mother. Women aren’t the ones who taught me that this was a competition. This isn’t a competition,
this is survival. In a world that already tells us we will never be enough.
Don’t you dare  build me up
on the backs of the women you ruined.
You don’t get to go throwing rocks
when you aren’t the one being stoned to death in the streets.
I don’t want to hear how you love me so much better than the others. Because I know, someday, you’ll be telling some other girl how she’s just so much prettier
than me.