I am writing anyways.
This poem is yelling
a relentless echo around me
for a reason.
It knows hide and seek
isn’t always a game,
sometimes it’s a lifestyle.
It knows I might as well have been wearing camouflage for my formative years
but I am trying to live a different life these days,
one more rooted in honest.
If I don’t write this poem,
Am I being honest?
Am I being myself?
If I don’t write it,
My history will become gossip in my own head and I will be playing a game of telephone with myself.
If I don’t write it, the trauma will gladly write it
and all of my poems for me.
It will write them backwards, upside down, and untruthful.
The poems will be hard to follow.
I will be harder to follow
They will blame me for everything
and it is not that I am without blame but I am certainly not alone with it.
So instead I’m here,
up here,
thinking about every human I have been so far in this life
and the ones I am yet to be.
Kissing the clouds in my head instead of scolding them.
Writing everything down.
Saying some of it out loud.
& This is progress.
No matter how slow,
how incremental,
how not always enough,
This is progress.
When I was sixteen I swore off mirrors
at twenty five swore off self-loathing
In between I mostly swore under men
but I learned I can curse and promise and swear a storm of something’s
but it will not change the fact that there are a thousand ways to lie to yourself and the world around you if you want to convince it of something you aren’t.
No matter what your mouth says,
Your actions matter most.
Speaking is an action.
This is an action.
But it’s only part of the process.
& 