Why do I lash out?
Whipping the rest of the world with my tongue and with my fist?
Wrecking those I hold close?
Willing to change but never quite making it.

Because I'm scared.

I'm afraid of myself and of others.
Of what I'm capable of and what I'm not.
Of what I see and what I'm blinded to.
Of living too much or not at all.

I'm scared of what's inside me.
Of what resides there, laying in wait to take me away.
Or maybe there's nothing inside of me.
No reason for my pain or anger.

What scares me most of all is exposing it to the world. The truth.
I'm a fraud. I'm not strong. I'm not clever. I'm not all that.
No matter how quickly my lips will move to tell you that I am.
No matter how quickly I'll try and silence those who say that I'm not.

That's what I'm afraid of.
That I'll look inside myself and find nothing.
And that you'll do the same.

Who are we to be brave?

Strutting against a rhyme scheme or a meter or form.
Fighting against a current that tides us all in. Endlessly.
Maybe patterns arise and patterns and patterns.
Adding and subtracting memories broken apart or together by the mind.

Maybe they don't.
Maybe we're left wondering what the **** happened to us, or thereabouts.
But whatever happened happened and that shouldn't matter.
Or maybe it should.
It doesn't matter.

Maybe it's ok to live in the future or the past or the present.
Maybe it's up to us to choose two.
Maybe it's not up to us at all.

So is life a wheel? Endlessly turning and spinning towards the next destination.
Or is it a block? Where sometimes we push and heave and can't budge it forwards.
It towers over us as we dent our hands and our shoulders and our foreheads trying to shift it, trying to ease it out of the dirt, trying and trying and trying.
All we can see is where we stand and where we've been.

Is fear ok then?
Fear is always ok.
It's the second strongest emotion.
Sometimes fear is the bravest thing we can do.

And so, standing against this block, heaving with everything I have, my feet digging down into the dirt beneath me I want to say with great fear and wavering that I love you and that I want to push forwards until it doesn't hurt to look back.