RE-CENTER

My nightmares come out to haunt me

All these mismatched memories

I rarely make it above average

It's doubtful that I'll win in the end

I keep doing my best to outdo myself

My spirituality is an amalgamation

I want to protect it with all my being

I want to cleanse my soul, my heart, my mind

And no matter where I turn

Still there are no answers

I never understood a gift until it stared me directly in my eyes

Websites that don't exist

Faces I've never seen

Things I've never experienced until it's too late

And already I wake up feeling worthless

I know enough about the diagnoses that I have

To trample on the doctors and psychiatrists who over diagnosed me

Label after label after label

Beaten into the dirt behind me

I have to break and beat these generational curses

My memory used to be so unreliable,

But once I began to challenge the people around me

The gaslighters and the narcissists,

The nepotist lucky ones

The millions I've never seen who have

Haunted me since Hamlet

Evil stories

Wicked people

For the sake of protecting identity

I never once understood why things happened the way that they did

But the more I try to explain to people

Exactly what happened to me

Whether it was all for a reason, a season, or a purpose

The less I begin to understand it

The more I am around those with negative energies

Or incessant beepings

Unfamiliar voices

I can't fight the pounding of my last right hook

And all across the board

It comes from a deep place of resentment

Unresolved traumas

What society values, is a stark contrast to

The harmony I wish to see in it

No matter what happens

No matter what book I read

Or dream I've dreamt

I come back to the haunting realization

It was a fifty/fifty split

As to how I could have gone

On this long and winding spiritual path.

The deepest breath I can take

Is 12 seconds in

Even with all the tar and sludge in my lungs

Even with all the evil that gets repeated back to me

I still hear the beeping

I still hear the slurs

I fought back against the injustices I've seen throughout my neighborhoods

Hell, I've lost everything

To those who seek to do me more harm than good

It will take 2 days for the sage to dry

It may take forever for me to feel healed

My innocence was snatched from me

Much earlier than I care to admit

I would do anything to let this all die out of me

My spirituality is not wrong

My spirituality is sacred and whole

I am not incomplete

I am renewed

I experienced what I now recognize as my first panic attack after a girl I loved turned me down

But even then, years before,

I remember waking up to a blue room

Shivering in the winter

Frozen in place, in fear

Against all that I as a child thought I understood

Not until I was age 10 did I even know I was different

I remember the night so clearly

Sobbing brokenly

Hearing the love story of my mother and my father for the very first time

Curled up in the fetal position on a baby mattress

That striking cobalt blue from the bubble back television still glows from behind my eyelids

And the story as it was first told still haunts me

I've probably died a thousand times over

Just to survive this lifetime

Again

And

Again

And

Again.