Down the Spiral

What if
the energy required to accept yourself exactly the way you are
equates precisely
to that required to change for the better?

Say this includes your cowardice:
the hours still spent
drowning in the broken sluice of your emotions.
Not a truce,
without a notion that the daybreak deluge
can be tapped without assumption;
understood without compunction;
standing tall without defensiveness;
no less the sense when your confidence
got shaken and undressed to serve another’s spiritual ends
to buff his spiritual lens.
“Finally,” he said “something you are good for.“

When he told you to dance and you did.
Jigging till the sense of who you know yourself to be
dislodged itself.
Then, floating in an empty narrative:
your eyes tied down by repetitive imperatives
as prayer hit your heartbeat like a sacramental sedative.
More spiritual phrases out of context of their heritage.
You were clawing for a culture, but really just afraid to live:
afraid to grow your own,
afraid to own the potholes in the road up to your home.

Because you are made of light, right?
There’s no room for fear.
When you are made of love and beauty, perfect like a sphere,
there is never need to fight, right?
Your heart is in the clear.
Sure you are holy, or you’re wholly insincere.

That’s what you’d think, since you hid behind a veil.
I want to know your bravery, but you’re afraid to fail.

So you wither down the spiral,
unable to answer wisely all the viral whys behind this guise
of feeling sorry for yourself;
of needing someone else to tell you how to live your life.
To play your part and pay blood tithes
in space he made sacred,
but twisted to mean what took place you intended.
No wonder you lost your way.
No wonder I lost myself.

The moment came when the body from whose blood he drew
was no longer me, but the you I’m speaking to.

So when he told me to sing and be free, but I couldn’t.
Caught like a bow-shot doe in the throat.
These wounds that don’t bleed sound like nos never said.
I had love songs for death, but no postage to send.
So when I told him I wanted to kill myself
and he said he would help me,
was he calling a bluff or had he already killed me.

Weakness, I can speak to this, the doubts that I conceal,
but acknowledging reality regardless how it feels.
To say that it’s OK to be afraid or if you stall,
you gain all the momentum used to rise up when you fall.
I’ll understand if you go quiet speaking not a word.
There is no hope to force you into happy, that’s absurd.