Do you ever feel strangled by the chrysalis?

Like, when was the promise of something beautiful so painful?

And you know you did it to yourself,

you feel the change and the natural order of things,

but you’re growing into something

you’ve never known yourself to be

and it’s just too goddamn suffocating?

Do you ever wish your wings would fall off?

Would you trade

the most beautiful parts of yourself

for the familiar certainty of crawling?

Are your favorite,

safest places no longer fit for you?

How bizarre it is,

for people to recommend staying in that silken shell,

to stay,

to change,

to fly on winds you’ve never felt,

to never miss the ground 

you spent your life learning to survive.

Growth is natural,

but so is the desire for safety.

So is the longing for the certainty of the past.

Yet the chrysalis wears thin,

and wings will grow and catch flight.

All we can hope for,

is to find shelter among flower petals.

I am built for small-scaled kindness.

Speeches made for a single person,

the childlike acceptance 

of people as they are.

I offer off-handed empathy

to a passing stranger

I never intend to see again. 

I am not one for revolutions

staring down the barrel of a gun,

staring into relentless opposition,

but I will stand at the front lines

of a poem to remind you

that you are not alone.

I am the peace waiting for you

when you get home.

I am the words you use to define “home.”

There is power in small victories

that need not be earned.

There is humanity 

that does not ask you

to prove your humanity.

Come back from your 

rallies and revolutions

in your own time,

and if you will forgive 

my absence from the battlefield,

you will find a place to rest

next to me.

It has taken me

eight months to write this poem.

To conjure feelings

from the depths of a medicated mindset

is a kind of haze

I have forgotten how to describe.

My disorders do not discern

the pen from the sword.

My disorders do not understand

that I no longer need to fight for survival.

I have always known life to be a war.

So what, then, is a ceasefire?

What name is given

to the starvation of demons

who have spent decades

gorging themselves

on everything I am?

This is the final enigma of strength:

learning when not to be strong.

Letting the cracks in my armor

bleed light into me.

Writing poetry made of lifelines

without being at the expense of my life.

I have not yet learned

how to live an unscripted fantasy.

I was not ready to be ok.

The person who writes this poem

is a stranger who wears my smile better.

She has outgrown my reasons for writing poetry,

choosing instead to live the art she sees.

I,

the poet you knew,

follow her

to see if she can also be called an artist.

Every conversation is a colosseum.

The armory is lined with

diction and pacing,

dynamics and posture,

weapons I can name

but never master.

My opponents,

so proficient in their practice

that I doubt they even know about

the delicate skirmish that they are winning.

When we part ways, they don't turn to see

the lesser adversary they have muted

scurrying into the security

of some remote corner.

I am a tactician in a game

that never asked for a winner,

and yet this arena counts my losses

in dents and stains.

The passages that hide my arrivals

feel darker,

more hollow,

as if the clanking of my weaponry

returning to their hooks were echoing

every

minute

mistake.

And every face I see,

every voice that calls my name

is another cry of the audience,

demanding another round.