it’s messy here…
There are poems that feel like they write you - this was one of them.
Not many will clap
for the kind of art
that demands your bloodstream.
They want the masterpiece,
not the marrow.
They want the finished product
but would recoil at the process
the breath caught sideways
because that line
this line
wouldn’t land
until it broke something wide open.
I have bled for this salvation
labeled stanzas
opened myself like scripture
and dared someone
to call it holy.
What Webster’s defines as poetry,
I call reclamation
what they call voice,
I call weapon
and witness
and altar.
And still,
I’m expected to smile
through the offering
through the parts of me
stitched into the margins
unpaid, unpraised,
unprotected.
I have emptied myself
into structures meant to contain
and capture
and still dug my way back to the promised land.
I have crafted beauty
from bruises still blooming
poems that catch sacred tears
And so, I can say that
there are days
when creation feels like defiance.
And I don’t know
if I inherited this resolve
or if I carved it out
from the wreckage
all I know
is that I find myself
reaching for language
that can hold me,
when I cannot hold myself
s t u t t e r i n g my way through healing
even when hope forgot my name
returning to the presence that meets me
in my own unraveling.
I do not look for deliverance
in full sentences
or raised fists
but I wonder if I could
stumble into it while painting in the shadows
because sometimes,
daylight is too harsh
I’ve learned that joy
sometimes
breaks through like shattered glass
but I can gather it anyway,
press radiant slivers into the clay
of something I pray
can sustain truth
even though I’ve watched this world
crown fallacies
and crucify the gospel.
There is an anointing
that lives in the hands of those
who create anyway
who have walked through grief so layered
it grew its own body
carried secrets and fresh heartache
And still,
they mold grief into a new form
let the ache that follows joy interrupt the mourning
just long enough
to remember the sun again.
This is not career,
content or consumption
this is an old
and a new covenant
a hallowed calling I keep answering
with pen and what’s left of my spine.
Courage?
If that’s what it is to be called, then
Know that it limps.
Know it shakes and trembles.
Know it will seem like it has
buried more than it has built.
It lives
in the gallery and the graveyard
in exhibits and in erasure
on canvases still wet
with the echo of loss and regret
moving through more than one
lens
exposure
that takes more than it gives
It floods the hush
of hospital rooms
where machines whisper
what miracles still shout
It shows its face
in courtrooms
and kitchens,
in custody agreements
and casseroles made for one
I’ve seen it in the haunt of parenting
with one hand on peace
and the other on panic,
trying to hold your children
and your sanity
together
It walks with the ones
whose skin has been treated
like a warning
and yet they dare
to exist in full color
to take up space,
untethered
unchained
It is in the memories we visit
and in the ones we
finally let go of.
I do not write because I am healed
I write
because some wounds
don’t stand a chance
until they are named
until they are unpeeled
and penned under my reckoning
bearable but now
bared
allowed to weep
because God knows I’ve seen things
I cannot pray away.
It sang in the baptism of this
body
that was once afraid
to believe again
hands raised
tongue loosed to testify
in the sanctuary
that once taught me shame
It’s in the walk-away
the stay-anyway
sketching resurrection through tremors
which is why I can return to my pages
with hands not always fully steady
but open and willing
because God still does miracles
art still is miracle
I still am miracle
right here,
these almost-silenced lines
this
this
is what I know.
Copyright 2025, The Unscripted Writer
