Identity

When the well ran dry and hope had fizzled out,

I tumbled, breaking on my great fall,

My fractured self just barely clinging to the wall.

The desolation, deprivation, the annihilation

Offered no consolation to my shattered self.

Though shredded into fractals, nothing was lost.

I did what all the king's men could not -

I took my pieces, all that was left,

And rended them into a kevlar vest.

The next chapter would be stitching myself whole again.

Locked in the bondage of the boundless, the infinite arrangements of the finite, the many-worlds of a countless verse.

Laden with latent power, the earth could sing and the heavens may shatter.

If focusing skill were easy to do Rome would’ve been built in a day.

But I am not an architect, this is not Rome, I am not a font, nor am I an oracle.

The future knows only what’s yet to come, I know only what has already passed, this moment is fleeting and endlessly repeating so my true potential yet lies in wait.

I'll take your hand and teach you to understand.

I'll light the fires they tried to extinguish, and when our inferno rages:

You'll say it's dangerous, but baby, let's risk it.

Unsure? Well, baby, I'm certain.

You'll say that we're over, but baby, this is only the beginning.

You'll say you don't know, that you'll need a plan,

but baby, no lesson's better than first hand.

I'll show you the understanding, don't you see the vision?

You say you're not of my nature, but baby, let's stop pretending.

What gets pushed down comes back up.

Baby, even if you wish I didn't, you know I fill your cup.

I weave my pain into my poems, I capture its sting in my photography.

I implore it to come find shelter in the storm.

My pain is my longing and loss, my love and the lack thereof, my battered body and battery.

Pain is a part of me that yearns for tender embrace, it wants be seen, to be heard; to be felt.

It was real and to deny it of that would be cruel.

It grew in the absence of love and the presence of suffering, so I water it with care and weed its gentle soil with compassion.

I tend to it and nurture it in the way I needed to be, underneath all that pain is little me.

As barbed hateful arrows rain from your skies, our storm is biding and brewing, building and stewing, raging and mounting as it bleeds from my eyes.

Your bigoted rage could never out-hate the millennia of violence that for you lies in wait.

Your violence may sink our ship but you’ll watch as our rage drags you into the abyss.

I’ll exact your vengeance ten-fold as I force you to reap the pain you sowed.

You won’t know peace for as long as we live, and even in death we’ll be your bitter end.

Even in your most violent and malignant dreams you never could’ve fathomed you’d be destroyed by me.

Not just queens, but now your rulers. for how many centuries were here for your abuse and amusement?

Reckoning comes whether you consent or not, your lives our choice, you’re a bottom now; we’re on top.

The flames of hateful ignorance you fan is no more than hysteria now; your miserable fragile egos weren’t befitting of a man.

May the queens rule and the kings fall, we’ll let them eat cake as we throw our ball.

Your head on a guillotine, a fitting end for your despotic regime.

It’s happened before and it will happen again,

Patterns repeat so it shouldn’t be a surprise,

Uncertainty and instability became a friend,

My face of joy and merriment is a disguise,

I’m in a loop of a constant rug pull without end,

I’m just so exhausted from having to improvise,

I’ll smile for them even if it costs all I can spend,

And this isn’t my home so I’ll commit to the lies,

But it’s their home of love so I’ll just pretend,

My wings are weary and my stamina was used,

Home might exist but I just don’t know where,

All my frayed feathers need is a place to roost,

So I suffer a hope that one day I get to be there.