Write Amuck

(For SouthernLovinBabe and anyone who takes the time to read my writing.)

I learned haiku and limerick and rhyme.

And I learned of beats and rhythm and time.

I learned how to make a sonnet sing.

And how to give a ballad wings.

I learned the grammar don’ts and do’s.

I dreamt in Blake and Angelou.

Hughes made me shake. Poe made me shriek.

 Shakespeare made my knees feel weak.

Silverstein and Seuss were pure.

Dickinson was so unsure.

Donne was brilliant. Whitman, sharp.

Eliot’s Prufrock broke my heart.

Tennyson called me to seize my fate.

“Come my friends, ‘tis not too late.”

And Frost kept me from counting sheep

With “Miles to go before I sleep.”

But my little voice, she tries to hide.

Hoping to stay trapped inside.

And go unnoticed, silently.

So to not compete with poetry.

‘Till the day I’m taken by a hearse.

I dare not utter a single verse.

And in my epitaph please say,

“This girl took poems to her grave.

So she couldn’t fail, she wouldn’t write

Completely paralyzed by fright.

So now we mourn for we’ll never hear,

The voice that loved poems so dear.

We’ll always wonder. We’ll wish we knew.

Perhaps she was a poet too.”

Yes, perhaps she was a poet too. 

I sat alone in my bedroom. Not under the covers, but on top of them. No lights. Only darkness. And I let the music surround me. A frail, breathy accapella voice singing a lonely song. I turned it all the way up, as loud as it would go. Too loud. I sat perfectly still. And shut my eyes. Her sweet, gentle voice. So vulnerable and strong at the same time. It glided around me as I breathed it in. Filled myself up with that achy ballad. And I didn’t dare exhale.

It was almost as if she was in the room with me. Singing to me alone. A disillusioned lullaby. A forgotten swan song. And as it ended, I tightened my eyes - forcing them closed. Willing her voice to come back to me. Willing the notes to go on. Just one more verse. One final refrain. Wanting to hear that sound more than I wanted to see or dream or think or be.

That feeling. That forsaken moment. I lived that for days and nights and weeks and months and years.

That feeling.  That’s what it was like to miss you.

This is me.

I’m middle class and white. 

I’m normal and curious.

I’m smart, but mostly ordinary.

I’m artistic, but not artsy.

I have a voice, but not a megaphone.

I am found, but not quite free.

I want only uniqueness. I want only to stand out. 

What a shame it is to blend in. When you could shine just as you are.

What a shame it is to blend in. 

What a shame it is to blend in.

Before you know it, life is over. And all you’ll ever wish is that you hadn’t.

Just blended in.

Anonymous asked: When the perpetrators admit to hating America, Americans and Western culture yet still moved to America to receive education that they couldn't get in their Muslim home, YES you can.

Your comment doesn’t even address what I said.

I’m saying that we cannot start believing that all Muslims or all Russians or all men or all twenty-year-olds are violent terrorists because these two happen to be. 

If you’re okay with making crazy assumptions about entire groups of people based on the actions/beliefs of two individuals, then you must be fine assuming all white men are terrorists since that’s who committed the Atlanta Olympic Park and the Oklahoma City bombings.

We’re not all bad, right? We’re not all condemned.

We shoot up classrooms of children. Bomb spectators at marathons. Open fire on movie theaters. Snipe government figures. Use the mall for target practice.

We’re not all bad, right? Some of us are the good. And on days like today, days heavy with the weight of evil, of grief, of burdens much too heavy to bear, on days like today I have to focus on the good.

In those dark, terrifying moments, we hover over the bodies of the innocent children to try to spare them from bullets rocketing through the air. We run towards the direction of the explosions, so we can help the wounded. We dive over our loved ones and offer our own bodies, our own flesh, as a shield.

Instinctively, we put others before ourselves. Even when the others are complete strangers. Some of us are the good. On days like today, we all have to see the good.

On days like today, it is not one for all. That one lost soul does not represent mankind.

And on days like today, it is most definitely all for one.

The good still exists. We are the good.