Molting Grace

The problem with having a split personality is that you know that as soon as everything is going right, something will go wrong.

Split personalities,

trusting in God,

having faith and hope and knowing that by his grace I can do all things,

When things go wrong I get so down inside,

so confused, so unable to cope but only because

I can’t get myself quite where I need to be intellectually.

Why does my own intellect get me down?

Maybe ignorance is bliss,

and I need to stop looking down and around at the people and the situations that make me stop and think.

All I wanna do with my life is make you stop and think,

I think,

that’s what I say,

I do truly aspire to inspire, but I get lost along the way.

Other things pop up, I get stressed, I see bright lights,

I wonder if I should just do what I’m good at to get this bread, and get ahead,

or at least get out,

get out of these school loans and this cage of anxiety that I trap myself into based on the fact that I don’t know what I want to do with my life.

I’m young, they say

the world is yours, they say

you are blessed and talented and beautiful,

and I know I am lucky to have the encouragement,

they say you can be successful.

These are the words that the little kids that I want to inspire need to hear,

the words that never reach their little ears

and so they see themselves as lumps of black coal without personality and value,

til they throw on bright kicks, learn to jerk or drop it low,

they wiggle with it and see that their lumps are in fact flexible,

see they can be a gangster or reinterpret the word ho, but fuck it,

cuz they’re just getting that money.

And I have all the words in the world,

to try to tell them to slow down,

to look inside, to realize the talent that they have,

to be something, something wonderful,

I want them to give their best selves to the world.

And I have all the words,

and yet for me these same words I want to pass to them create a pressure cooker,

and I drown inside them, water boiling up around me,

a bright future shoving its letters into my nostrils and making it hard to breathe.

I am gasping for air in a world that threatens to suffocate me

because of all of its great expectations.

I am the only one that doesn’t see them, or I do,

but now I am a lump of clay terrified of being molded into the wrong image,

being a beautiful statue that represents nothing, but is powerful.

Or being plastacine,

never ever taking a final form,

I’m a chameleon, just adapting to anything but not having anything that speaks of home, that helps me take my final form.

I am molting,

which just means my skin is fucking falling off and my soft wet red bleeding insides are left pulsing,

exposed to the world, to the dirt of it,

the sting of hot air full of other people’s breathe and bacteria,

whipping against the sinewy muscles of my neck, my shoulders, my back, infecting me. And this hazardous situation doesn’t seem to have a way out.