I don’t want to live more gratefully.
I want the luxury to take my life for granted.
I don’t want to be reminded of our fragility.
I want the chance of pain to disappear.
We deserve to exist on our own terms.
Two rights make a wrong
when your right
suppresses mine.
Can we rewrite in real time
the rules of this arrangement,
the way that we engage with
all the people we call strangers?
Perhaps we’ve more in common
then we’re often told to believe.
Perhaps we’d figure that out
if we’d stop judging and just speak.
But oh, we only listen
to find space to interject
instead of just listening
to provide space to understand.
To understand all the things
we don’t understand at all.
We must choose to comprehend
or comprehend we’ll fall.
If we do not heal our wounds
we will bleed onto those who did not hurt us.
This saying affects me in ways I did not expect.
The expectation is the hardest part.
What it means to be a man.
Teach me, again, what it means to be a man?
Who taught you? And who taught them?
Each meaningless milestone
is wrought with our creation
worthless expectations that are unrealistic.
It’s almost sadistic how we push them onto others
and ourselves.
A toughness that evolves
only based on fear.
We wouldn’t need toughness
if there was no fear.
Why can’t we create
a kindness that permeates
and settles even the saddest souls?
And why do we call them wounds
when it’s more like a cancer?
Infecting generations
one after another.
We are not born equipped
to fend off these attacks.
But we cannot carry on
these sins of the past.
We owe it to ourselves
to sow and mend ourselves back together.
Because if we do not heal our wounds,
we will bleed onto those
who did not hurt us,
forever.
What if the pursuit of peace
isn’t a chase at all?
What if peace already lives
within our self-contained existence,
cloaked in its insistence
it never be found?
And as it hides we move our eyes
to look anywhere but here.
But here peace thrives
in the minutiae of life’s few stops,
in the breaths between our thoughts.
Peace is not some promise
or a prize to be won.
It’s not a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
Instead, you’ll find peace in the moments you stop moving.
Only when you end the chase
may peace reveal its place.
In a world imperfect,
we cannot expect symmetry.
For the curved roads and uneven hills
remind us of unpredictability.
The ability of the ground to shake
or the boulders to tumble.
Our lives are often guided
by how we clear blocked paths.
We’re defined by how we traverse without maps,
how we dance without song,
by how we carry on.
It is anything, but easy or simple.
But we cannot always draw
within these lines we create.
We must find comfort in the inevitability
the lines will break.
In reverse
we go.
Unless you know some other way.
It’s how I’ve lived my life.
Mired in my mistakes.
It must be painful to watch.
I was merely born like this.
I’m apt to take the long way around
even when the path at my feet is the shortest.
I often wonder why the mirror isn’t friendlier,
why what I see feels like a betrayal.
Thoughts of failure and disappointment.
I must unlearn the lie in this portrayal.
For what I see is a mere reflection
processed to believe it’s wrong,
that years of abuse on my body
are no excuse for carrying on.
But I carry with me this baggage
for the years of abuse that hold on.
My curves cause pain to my mind
I spent years settling down with a meal.
Now society shames me unfairly
when all I intended was to heal.
For what I see shouldn’t matter
except to myself when I stare
at a young man who’s told
he shouldn’t look that way.
But why?
Why do they care?
Where will it appear?
In my mind it’s always there.
Infiltrating thoughts
and creating more.
But physically, how will it show?
A tick in the hands, shoulders, neck or face.
Which subconscious choice
will lead to today’s disgrace?
As my heart races,
my anxiety settles in.
Making its home
in a space too familiar.
I wish I could wish it gone,
to not be burdened by its grip,
wondering where it will appear,
tick
after
tick.
Who are they, those who tell us how to think?
And who were they before we put them on TV?
What makes them qualified to speak
on every subject, whatever they please?
And why do we listen?
Why do we make nests in their echo chambers and tunnel vision?
Why do we stay blind to other viewpoints?
Deaf to other voices?
When will we ask ourselves these questions?
When will seek answers from those who have studied the answers?
Those without agendas.
Because those who speak the loudest may only be trying to upend us.
The words were as haggard as the speaker,
drunken and pathetic.
How long were they hidden on your tongue,
just waiting for a malicious reveal?
True words bring out true colors.
But I see you in black and white.
A transparent mask on your face
with a mouth full of lies,
each with a splinter that sticks to my skin.
I expected more of you, I did, from my own kin.
And shouldn’t we all expect more?
But to share that is to be unfair.
So expectation dissolves into enabling.
And enabling leads us here.
To the words that sting,
each one deeper, indeed.
But each word says more about you
than they do about me.