So many voices yelling and echoing and cluttering up
Every heartbeat with dissonant commands;
Discordant rhythms
That give chase, pulse racing wildly ahead,
But I can never escape because the speaker is

Myself.

Who taught me these monologues of doubt?

I’m trying to find some dark corner to crawl into
And hide
From all of the should be’s
And didn’t you’s
And what if’s
And why aren’t you good enough to
And why can’t you just fix everything
And why aren’t you strong enough
To just live
And not break at every streak of light
Surmounting the dregs of night when the morning returns again
And still there is a feeling of falling
And not knowing if you should reach out and hold onto something,
Or not?

And so you just grip your coffee cup as if it were
A solitary rock
In the middle of
A storm-whipped sea
And I really just need to wrap myself around
Something that is made of clay
And dirt,

Drag my spirit through the veins of the earth,
Where the cut-banked canyons rise into a
Reddened western sky  
And release the broad-winged birds to flight.

And everything is quiet

And I know my worth:

No more or less than the brush along the shore.
No more or less than the darting shapes across the river’s floor.
No more or less than the dusk,
Than a gentle touch across my face,

Than love;

No more or less than love

And how it spills like water over rocks
And moves like music through the blood

And how the morning becomes quiet
And I am
Just
Singing softly to my children,

I won’t give up.