Art.

There is something very powerful

And terribly exhausting

About putting pen to paper.

This is the simple,

Yet complex reason

I have not allowed

My heart to be shared.

I am not ready

To exert that kind of energy.

Nevertheless,

Here am I.

Though I lay in bed

Too paralyzed to move,

My mind has no problem moving.

It runs,

Or rather sprints, madly

In one hundred different directions

At a pace of one hundred miles per hour.

I find a single path

I dare to choose and journey down.

I don’t have the energy

To keep searching for paths.

I slow down.

I break.

I fall.

I pull my tired body up

From the slumped over mess I was,

I take a step out on the abandoned trail.

Immediately

I regret my choice.

The path looks daunting,

The journey hard.

My eyes frantically search

For a way out.

I am already lost-

There is no way back.

As I turn to face the path before me,

I begin to understand

Why I couldn’t return the way I came.

I was stuck here,

But this is exactly

Where I needed to be.

I started to see things-

Things I could have seen no other way

Than to be trapped with them

Right in front of my face.

I began to recognize a need

To release the chaos

Residing within my soul.

I am a glass bottle

With fatal poison built up inside.

With no more room for chaos,

I feel the pressure painfully building within.

I am exhausted.

I am dying.

Soon the pressure will be too much;

I will shatter.

By writing, tiny pieces of glass

Are being chipped away,

Providing an escape

For the deadly toxins.

It is both refreshing

And painful,

Relieving

And deadly.

I am broken

And breaking.

If I let out too much at once

I will shatter altogether.

There is a slow and painful art

To being broken

But not dead;

To release pain

In such a way

To begin healing

And not the process of carving

My own headstone.