i am my future
i am my savior
i am my destiny
i am the key

the curse breaks through me
and through the breaking
comes forth my salvation
as it was inside of me this whole time

https://imgur.com/a/rVm5rXS

I am a scholar, magician, architect
But also a gladiator about to burst through the gates
I am the Hermit but also the Sun hiding behind the clouds
I am the sword never drawn, fire never started
I am begging to be realized as I should be
Protective hands that would never do such a thing
For fear they would lose me in life's claws

Do not ever allow yourself
to reduce the incomprehensible miracle
of your very existence

to basic questions of self-worth.
Do not ever allow your boss to write you off
as nothing more than a worker

who is failing to meet
some arbitrary set of expectations.
Do not ever allow a bully to tell you
that you are nothing more than a child

lacking in physical strength.
Do not ever allow a politician
to boil your being

down to a cheap distillation
of inside jokes and snickering, racist
circumlocutions.

The fact that you are here,
today,
alive and present
and reading these words
is a stentorian, staggering miracle.

We are,
all of us,
perhaps guilty
of occasionally forgetting
this fundamental fact.

But we must remember,
you and I,
and every other being with us,
that we sprang forth from nothing—
absolute oblivion—
into awareness and consciousness
and individuality, and personality
in this gargantuan, freezing, largely empty universe.

Allow me to remind you
that that idea
is entirely incredible—
the purest void was somehow spun into
the totality of your being—
into the infinity of the present moment—
a Möbius-strip mindfuck
expanding outward in space and time
reaching toward all directions simultaneously.

The fact that you and I are here is miraculous.
And the fact that you exist is a miracle.

Do not ever let
our sickly civilization
try to tell you anything to the contrary.

it's true.
I would love,
to like me.

Everything you own is covered in blood.
     They arrive on moments composed of crumpled paper, tired and degraded by the heat and pressure of God's palm, left in Her pocket too long. ******* and apathetic inaction meet in the center of the sheet where your pelvis, your s e x rests while you sleep and lie and lie and sleep and sleep and lie. A Rorschach blot card where you see the death of dignity. Mother, Roommate, and Tinder Dates that you never bring home see everything that they had hoped you weren't.

     Cochina. Pig, ******* pig.

     And I can't read that last verse out loud. That tells you everything you need to know.

Everything you own is covered in blood.
     You bleed when you don't feel enough, or when what you feel isn't what you ought to feel--silly ******* scholarship with the brains and the championed cheek bones (if you just lost the weight, she says to herself sometimes, and her friends don't agree, but there is a deafening lack of disagreement that takes the room).

     Bold girl who never made suicide jokes because she was so so so good at this game called self love until she wasn't. Until she ran out of bad ***** juice. Until she felt the weight of it, the world.

     And so you choose to feel the bite of an exacto knife.

Reliable, that.
Pleasurable, that.
Guilty, guilty pleasure.
Shameful pleasure.

     We were supposed to be grown up, glowed up. Above this.

                                                  **** this.

     When did it become so hard to love yourself?

in the same breathe
i tell myself i am better, and yet
there is no such thing as best