"When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am…" –Maya Angelou
I can’t battle the presumption
Carried in my words
That I’m not a channel for destruction
That I’m not better left unheard
I can’t drown out little whispers
Wearing my own voice
When I always chose my battle’s victors
And it was never the right choice.
Ever the same,
The days that drag on.
There’s anger and pain;
Love’s all that’s gone.
What is there to live for?
Ever the same,
The hours tick by.
What’s here that’s sane?
All I can do is cry,
But I don’t know who to cry for.
Ever the same,
The minutes say goodbye.
They say such things are tame;
But it takes only a minute to die,
So much longer to find something to die for.
Ever the same,
The seconds don’t ask why;
They never ask your name —
Only that you do not lie
When you face the choice that you’ve been waiting for.
I could set the blame for my existence
Squarely at your feet;
Or my life in its present instance
I could christen your defeat.
Or I could claim my turning point
Was somewhere over there,
And blame the careless wanderer
Who had no fire I could share.
I could fit upon the scales of justice
The world, by degrees,
And blame my failures on this:
The whip and bended knees.
But for all the blame that could’ve been,
There’s nothing to debate.
Others may bring suffering;
Only I can change my fate.
There’s a part of me that hates the lie
When I am told to be myself;
I’ve felt pieces of me die
To preserve another’s sense of self.
Yet who is there to blame, but I
Who made the choice to hold my tongue
And not to let the thing untie,
Lest I make another come undone?
Better that I rage and sigh
In quiet places no one sees,
And let that part that hates the lie
Find truth in tending others’ needs.
There’s so much of artistry
Where can there be a place for me?
With bitterness I lace my words
To quell the death I’ve chosen
As if it puts me with the birds
To lace my quill with poison
But I know myself afraid of heights
And that we create our greatest plights
Yet I don’t know what to do
When everything that I could be
Always seems to look like you
And I have no clue what would look like me
So instead I merely take what’s free
And try to turn it into artistry.
On any given day,
I am glass or I am stone;
A reflective, fragile thing,
Or else incredibly alone.
On any given day,
I choose which one to be:
Someone reflecting pain,
Or one who does not see.
I’m flying at half-mast
Just a symbol of the past
A thing better deleted
And you’d better do it fast
Because we can’t get caught on reasons
It all comes down to someone’s treasons
And if every win is someone else defeated
Then the world is just zeroes and ones
When no one wants to be a number
And we all just want to be a winner
But nowadays everyone is seated
Eyes getting ever dimmer
Straining to see a different road
Trying to write a different code
In the same language that we treated
As an overbearing load
When what we don’t really want to carry
And what we really want to bury
Is that all we are, we created
We wrote ourselves in binary
There is only little boxes
And one big grave
I can use the little boxes
Little things to save
But big things are left out in the sun
To fester and turn rotten
I can choke on things left in the sun
Or have them buried and forgotten
I am alone of my own volition
Friendship contrary to my mission
To be, as much as one can be in a day,
Never in the way.
She’d been alone for all she’d known
And so to spy him by the sea
With his broken heart beside, unsewn
Struck her own so tenderly
She ached to come up from the foam
And ached the more that he could see
No more a seal without a home
But a beautiful selkie
Instead, she only watched him go
And her sadness filled the sea
But the ending would be always so
And a binding would not make her free
Writer In Retrospect 