A Question Of Balance

What have you left for me?
Where is my Sanctuary?
Dare you presuppose my intentions?
Did I invite your presuppositions?
What are of my life
Does not fall under your purview?
Must you condemn and expound upon
My Shortcomings?

How dare you insult and degrade me
Condemning me in your tiny little brains
Far easier than comprehension
And Understanding

So you have rewarded me
In my fledgling quest for friendship
And Love
Qualities you neither sincerely offer
Or consistently display for others

You are all extremely shallow
And in-compassionate
As the echos of your viciousness
Will attest to

These same echos that have
Battered my self confidence and esteem
Left with you
Their origins
To remind you of yourselves
As I choose to hear you no longer

What light have you not shaded?
What dreams have you not soiled?
And what have you left for me?

As you hold up mirrors
So I can clearly see
My decaying self
I close my eyes
So the mirrors I was
Once reflected in
Are left
So you may see yourselves

As if you couldn’t tell
Or did not take notice
To the destruction you had
Partaken in
Or perhaps I did not cry loud enough
As you trampled my Soul

It’s all there, you see
But you did not see my words
For what they are
Maybe you’ll now understand
What I’ve been trying so
Hard to say

I’m already dead you see
Walking around on legs that want to collapse
Looking through eyes that
No longer desire to see
Hearing through ears that long to
Shut out your voices
But thinking with a brain
Where it is replayed
Over and Over and Over and Over

Because I cannot forgive
Myself for all of you
And I pray to be taken away
From this world I despise
And the despicable people
Who inhabit it

‘Rose of memory, rose of forgetfulness
Torn and most whole…’

And in this one action
I leave forever
The Hell of my mind
The agony of my dreams
And the pain of my failures
As you sit snugly
In a comfortable chair
And grow old
Something I will gladly never be

And my purity and innocence
I will return to
Never again tortured
By your disappointments, fears, loves
And misconceptions
In and of someone
You never knew or understood

For you are the destroyers
And I thumb my nose at you
As I finish the job you started
What have you left for me?

J.A.
12/27/1994