Agency, Up For Grabs

This world can be ruthless appearing to meet you at every turn with blows and battering. Appearing I reiterate, for most of the time, I like to think it’s all about perception, attitude, and basically how you choose to interpret your situation. This is good news, I tell myself, for then I am able to see that, when people do things that happen to hurt/disappoint/offend me… it’s very often about them and not about me.

Now some will say that this is an easy way to absolve myself of responsibility. It could be, in given circumstances. However, very often, succumbing to the belief that there is something “wrong” with you and that is why all these things are happening to you is definitely also absolving responsibility. It allows you to play helpless victim when in fact, you always choose to put yourself and remain in situations. You have agency.

So then, if you choose to stay in an uncomfortable situation, isn’t it then about you? Well, the offensive occurrence is not about you, but what you do about it, is all you. If you stick around for continued bruising, that’s you. Battered wife syndrome etc.

And the irony of it all is that we yearn for this word we liberally throw around, “freedom”, and yet when we begin to taste it, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Bondage seems so much easier.


(And these cycles of enlightenment can be frustrating. Wasn’t I at this realization before?)

Intangible Escapes

Death come quickly
Swallow me whole
With no reservations for pained looks

And scrutinizing eyes

Shuttle me into memory
Where every picture will capture me smiling

If images need exist at all

Lips, mumbling, whispering
Trying to grasp and retrieve
Pieces

Of utterings and sensations

And my name
If I’m lucky

If it matters at all

I am peaceful when I compose my fates
But I get familiar still with the nature of the storm

Eyes deceive
The inevitable inspires defiance

As a chained man bolts for the door

I set them free
And they come back to haunt me
I hear them say they need me

Or is it I who am in need

To remember
Is to forget
The present that haunts you
With hollow visions

Of what there was to come

Misery searches for its hero
Taking occasional vacations
For memorable moments
Destroyed before they can even learn to

Breathe

They say suffocation is painless
That fumes knock you out before
The fire burns
And life is taken care of

Before it really begins

To water my eyes.