My house is filled with pictures
of people I never see,
keeping its aura of eerie serenity
and complacent loneliness
so perfectly crafted
that when I find the devil on my shoulder,
screaming its whispers of sweet nothings,
****** every millimeter of my eardrum,
reverberating,
trying to minimize me into
an absolute
non-existence,
I almost believe him,

but the beating I feel under my sternum,
the one that keeps my eyes alert
and my cheeks pink
and my chest slowly lifting up and down...
even when those assaulting words
gnaw their way inside of each crevice
of each lobe
of the brain that’s constantly playing defense...
that beating is the tempo
to a lullaby
whose lyrics remind me
that God made my timeline different for a reason.