Padded walls, cuckoo hearts, hospital gowns, med reviews, locked exits,
that's all visitors rant and rave about as if we are deranged humans
who screwed up a chance at normalcy, chose to starve off stability.
Should we be excommunicated from this Earth
like heretics of the Church?
We may be toddlers now, teetering, tottering,
trying to balance ugly names
"cutter", "pothead", "addict" and "crazy"
pumping misled identity into our blood.
- Cleansed by something, something that breathes us anew -
Why does shame exist when we've all shrieked "EMERGENCY", 911 calls
on our minds though we never quite have the courage
to commit to change.
Remember the 12-step program? Admit, admit, share.
We all break down.
We are vintage milk bottles,
emotions mixing inside like unnamed chemicals
and we boil, boil, then explode;
glass pierces our veins, experiments of violence.
We were never world class scientists,
we knew nothing all along, traveling
interstates that roar with rush rush rush as the world
betrays and stabs our esteem.
But we don't have to bleed like hit-and-run victims.
- Cleansed by something, something that breathes us anew -
We don't discover all the answers, we aren't professors of mathematics
who can solve an algebraic equation with x= this.
Our lives are not that simple.
Labels are not our bar codes, there should be no
judgement in seeking shelter,
for safe zones are sometimes what we crave when in the
frontlines of our minds.
Peace exists within, but is nurtured from the stories
we plant in private gardens,
hoping for the day when we find similar seeds to learn and grow from.
- Cleansed by something, something that breathes us anew -
-
Written 10/01/2014 in a poetic form called the Bop, created by Afaa Michael Weaver. I learned about this in my creative writing class and this was one assignment.
Here is a link describing more in detail:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-bop
I did have to re-format with the line breaks to fit on the screen.
Originally the three repeated lines are supposed to be lyrics from a song we choose and my choice was "Something in the Water" by Carrie Underwood, but I decided to write my own refrain.
