Sinsugi

Everyone told me, when I was younger

To become something.

But I wanted to be too many things

I wanted to be everything

Kaleidoscopic visions of beauty and ideas and adventures

A maker, writer, traveler, lover, warrior-poet-king

Enough for somebody enough for me

How could I be just one?

But what nobody thought to say was that

if you didn't choose the world would choose for you

Being something wasn't optional

The scalpels of expectations, necessity, limitation, and time

Would all take their pound of flesh

And whatever your interests their interest was compound

And the world can't abide a debt

So I started trying

Too late, maybe,

but with the earnest intensity you only see in people

Trying to make up for who the weren't with who they might be.

I held each of those could-have-beens under the water until I felt their little limbs stop moving and hoped the rivers current mike take that memory away with it too some day

What they didn't say

Was how much you weren't allowed to be

To be something meant being some thing others allowed you to be

And somehow, always a little less than you needed to breath

Limbs kicking for purchase in the water

Eyes towards the sun

Too late maybe

To turn that violence into art,

to grasp that chisel as pen and sword

to make something out of some thing made of me