Self-imprisonment



Lingering thoughts faded into the recesses of captivity.
Chains dangled around from movement in the dark.
Each limb locked and each cell locked individually,
lowering humans to the primal level of base one instinct.

Things we told our minds fed the multitude of insecurities.
Doubts forever entangled us all in our own web of despair.

Each person alone and squared off in dank alcoves.
Every thought they owned, a captive to a million lies.
Every fiber of my being boxed inside one by one.
Every hope dissipated like a drop of dew dying.

Blind to consequence though linked by desire,
wrestling to be free from the ailment of one’s own slavery.
Whispering to ourselves as a waft in the still air
of how to get the keys back we so eagerly gave away.

About this poem

Self-imprisonment: I can’t remember when, but it was sometime before March 7, 2009, I originally published this poem along with The Secret Enclosure on poetry.com. I feel like it was sometime around the 2003-2005 time frame, or earlier if memory serves. This was the time period it was owned by the Maryland-based company called The International Library of Poetry, and before I entered graduate school for education and English. The poems are about struggling with stumbling blocks in your faith. As it pertains to me, it was about stumbling blocks in my Christianity and the feeling that you’re losing ground to your worse demons than to your better angels. The poems were written in the early-nineties, during a time I was focused on my faith and attending some very conservative churches, which has since changed after escaping an abusive man who was trying to change my sexuality by force and coming out. 

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Written on 1994

Submitted by zero_of_nine on September 10, 2022

Modified on March 16, 2023

44 sec read
18

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXAX XB XXXX XABX
Closest metre Iambic heptameter
Characters 752
Words 148
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 2, 4, 4

Curtis Carmen Davis

Curtis Carmen Davis is a Midsouth poet published in various regional publications in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. He has received several Awards of Merit from the Nashville Newsletter Poetry Contests and won two essay awards for CCSB travel abroad study to London, Scotland, and later Ireland. In 2016, and 2017, he was published in The Secret Life of Poets poetry magazine. He lives in the misty mountains of East Tennessee. He likes to draw and paint in his spare time. more…

All Curtis Carmen Davis poems | Curtis Carmen Davis Books

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