One who reasserts power constantly
Shows strong signs of weakness, impotency!
Though they may deny it vigorously,
Perhaps protest a little too loudly?

The stigma that sensitive people are weak needs to diminish.
Just because she feels things down to her bones does not mean she is weak.
She carries everything. Her feelings, other people’s feelings, the world around her as she takes it all in.

* *
Sensitivity is deemed feeble.
Thick-skinned people are the brave ones, right? They have endured so much that they no longer feel anything. Snide remarks, rude comments, and stressful situations roll off their skin like water during a storm. If it’s already pouring, why worry about each droplet?

*
That is the problem, she thought to herself. Are brave people truly brave?
No.
Brave people are the true cowards. Rather than taking their experiences and feeling them, letting them seep into their bones to become the marrow which fuels their bodies, they shut them away; skeletons in a closet.
They have become numb to the baggage they carry at the expense of growing numb to everything else.

*
People around her are merely living in this world, she decided, whereas she was absorbing it.
In the spring she lays in the grass, running her fingers through each blade as if it were the Earth’s hair.
When summer nights bring a light breeze, she imagines spirits are hugging her.
In the fall when it rains, she spreads her arms wide and gazes up to the sky, knowing that each water droplet that falls is Mother Nature peppering her skin with kisses.

*
Others are too preoccupied making sure their skeletons do not peer out of the closet.
Strength, after all, is the ability to withstand vast amounts of pressure and God knows how much force those skeletons must bear.


*
In the middle of the night, her father hears her talking to someone, except there is no response. It is as if she is conversing with herself when in actuality, she is conversing with her skeletons.
After midnight when others have drifted off to sleep, hoping that their skeletons do not come to haunt them, she is wide awake, her closet door open.
She lays in bed and asks her anxiety how it’s day was, laughs at a witty comment that her depression has made about her life, and gives thanks to the insult a bully gave her in the first grade for making her the person she is today.
The things that should weigh her down, she has befriended. They come to visit so often, anyways.

* *
She wonders how someone who has mastered the art of suppressing their feelings is braver than someone who has mastered the art of acknowledging their feelings.
The strength it takes to keep the closet door shut is immense.
However, it takes an unsurpassable amount of resilience to carry the world in her heart and soul while still having the courage to open her closet without being afraid of the things that could jump out at her.

I sit enclosed in my prison cell,
Days passing me by in a blur,
Have I lived here for months or years?
Of that I can't say for sure.

Time is twisted up in knots,
Tangled in a crooked maze,
With no clock to keep tabs on it,
The hours are pulled a thousand ways.

These walls seem like they are closing in,
Carefully shifting and changing shape,
I look for a way out of this hell,
But these bars carry no escape.

My prison bears no windows,
It's doors of steel stand strong,
Fear is tearing down my spirit,
I've been here far too long.

I'm held captive in this place,
A hostage to circumstance,
Frozen by broken regret,
I'm trapped in some awful trance.

I act like a puppet, I'm a slave,
To my residual anger and pain,
Instead of me, my emotions are,
Controlling the strings inside of my brain.

I don't understand why I am still bound,
To the cage, my heart resides in,
Each moment I try to free myself,
I am kept back down by sin.

I am shackled to my suffering,
And these bonds are too hard to break,
The cuffs I wear are cast from sorrow,
And the chains forged from heartache.

I'm imprisoned in my own weakness,
A jail of my imaginative design,
I gaze at my reflection,
I honestly can't believe it's mine.

When will I unlock the exit,
So I can open the door finally?
Maybe when I come to realize,
That i am the one who holds the key.

My bookshelves still remember you.
They are full of sketchbooks that forgot you broke my heart.
They wear your name proudly across pages trying to capture your smile between its covers.
I don't have the heart to tell them.

I don't want to tell them that those eyes can't tell what I'm thinking without saying a word.
That those hands can't guide me through forests and cities, through anxiety and depression.
That those arms are not home.
That I cannot hear his laugh with those lips.

And until your smile is no longer synonymous with the first letter of "lost" and the first three of "over",
your name will be the only word in my vocabulary
because I don't need anything else.

If only I could draw on a smile,
maybe my sketchbooks would think
I'm happy now too.

A Chain is only as Strong
As its Weakest Link

A Window only as Clean
As its Dirtiest Side

But Family means
Sharing your Strengths
And Weaknesses
So that none are Weaker
Nor Stronger

You are simply One Family
Together

Family does not hold Family back

We often wonder why our hearts
get broken, and I think I am
beginning to understand why.

A tiny thing, so precious yet so
fragile, had to be undone before
it can be made whole again.

My guess is, in putting the pieces
back together;
we find strength in weakness.
We find courage in vulnerability.
We understand ourselves better.

And with what we lose,
we also gain more of ourselves.

Thieves, thieves.
Christ are we petty.

Could not have imagined
such a death
Such a short-sited
venomous slip of the mind
such a death-toll...
so unpredicted-ably sad to see
            A mighty species
Die.

That's the fate of the fate-less, I guess
Our gods were a faceless
Mass
of derangement
Massive enough to take us to space.
What we've plucked from out of our souls
We can never replace

Such as it is, we have no chance
Put to death.
****** and detached.
That's how it ends
--surrounded.

We write out
these sorrows
that aren't really sorrows
and
Pin the tasteless love to our chests

Oratorical ****-hoarding
Trade-card victims
with no actual dignity left.

How embarrassing..
the glory of man-kind
To face a demise,
so mundane.

Forsaken by lies.


Our souls have been neutered and
Turned into tools for
Violently-popular
Prostitution-alized fools

Love for the luscious
the rush of the snarling
Hysterical rousings of
Tumultuous twerps.

This is the way that history ends.

Resting in our dreams.