beauty

Step one: search for beauty in everything
Every view this life sets in front of you has it.
Somewhere.
At first it might feel like I spy,
Like where’s Waldo,
But then you get to the point where a dead gray Baton Rouge sky
Gives you goosebumps
Looks nothing but lovely
And you can glance up at any time and get yourself in awe
Unable to understand what people mean when they call the weather ugly

I was 16
Caught sneaking out to make party out of my backseat
Standing between my mother and two policemen
In trouble up to my knees
I remember admiring the rich, misty 2 AM sky
And thinking how good it feels to breathe
Being scared, yeah, but joyful
I’m 19, y’all, I’ve barely lived any life at all,
I don’t know much of anything
But this:
Find the beauty.
Treat the experience you’re in like a gift.
Who knows what the alternative is… isn’t?
Gratitude before all else,
Gratitude and the power to find beauty.

Understand beauty is one of those canvas words,
Like love, like sex, like fun, like “I” or “me,”
Don’t let nobody else do your painting.
You have to build it yourself.
You are born with the pieces.

Somebody smart and selfish heard how we treat that word.
“Beauty.” Like it needs to be hunted and killed and stuffed
And hung on a wall with its teeth bared for all to see.
Smart and evil people made it into an industry
That knows us better than we know ourselves sometimes.
It saw us ignore what we have, vibrating in everything,
Beauty as atoms,
Waiting to be owned
For what it is,
Real,
Sitting in our skin
But we missed it.

Industry saw we were oblivious to the gorgeousness we’re living in,
Blind to our own perfect bodies,
So it tricked us.
Into thinking we need to
Conceal, contour, smooth out, slim down, bulk up, highlight, tighten,
Pluck, plump, cut, clip, pop, push up, straighten, and otherwise change
Or fix em.
We probably heard commercials for clear, spotless skin
Age reversal cream,
Weight loss, diets and surgery,
Tummy tucks
Through our umbilical aux cord
Plugged into the scary side of the world.
They have diagnosed us as ugly.
They say it’s inherited,
But don’t worry,
They have a cure, they have powder to sell us.
They don’t care about us; they will tell us
(And do), in every inch of ad-space they can
That we are lacking.

But I don’t need anyone to tell me
My birth mother’s arms were exactly
perfect, beautiful, full of love,
So were the ones that took me home,
And so was my street that Saturday evening;
So were the trees, and this life
That is,
This beauty.

Beauty is yours. I can see it, you’re leaking
beauty
Is something we must build on our own.

Anyone who tells you you need to change to be beautiful
Wants your money,
Will not leave you alone.
This garden we are growing in
begs for our true colors;
Yet they said to each of us, be a red rose;
Said to the daffodils, your yellow is wrong;
To the magnolia, you are so frightfully big, you better fix that;
To the hibiscus, you should buy this, it’s crimson;
Do not listen.

Find your beauty. Understand it often looks nothing like you were told.
Be it.
Your petals, your shape, your expression, your freedom
To bloom.