Touched With Fire

 

I’ve been there many times before,
I’ve walked the line, I’ve drawn it fine.

Unbalanced, unafraid of it,
So I can sabotage myself
To fall more often than I should,
The way I’m wired, turned around.

I think I recognize the times
It’s happening to me and still
I let the free fall vortex yawn
That swallows my identity.

I disappear most ways as one,
But you can’t tell, you won’t see me.
Yet in my life with poetry,
The more you read, I’m everywhere.

My po’ems, all, a puzzle piece,
To gather, forming images,
Developing a sense of self.

The dark of my mentality
Is rife throughout the camouflage.
But all the rest is also there;
Including things I never knew.

‘Twas for years the black pit in me
Did all it could to end my life.
At times the hours turned to days
Before I’d come to somewhere else.

I was hurt in so many ways
But friends would find & take me in
And give me a reason to live
Till black came the curtain again.

It seemed it would never happen,
A chance at a life worth living.
Certainly not the unworthy,
Uplifted from hell into grace.

My friends knew me better than me;
I’m lucky that this was the case.
Over time, I studied a lot:
A cripple relearning to walk.

The one thing I’d had but forgot,
I soon re-embraced in a trance,
The freedom I felt when it came
From my spirituality.

A renewed meaning in my life
And how I felt as a poet.
To dare and share the inner self
Can encourage others to write.

I’ve vanished, gone into thin air
In puffs of smoke from fi’re storms,
To reappear in written words
Among the volumes of my strife.

I’ll always be alive, unsinged,
If you know my humanity.