Shapeshifting

Finbar Shields
Sep 8, 2018 · 2 min read

I spent so long trying to be a good man,
I forgot how to be.
I forgot how to roar my bellows across the fire of the land,
loosen my taut and flared muscles,
signalling skyscrapers
that were only sandcastles.
I left my nimbus cloud stuffed in a draw,
a shred of cotton wool,
instead of stretched into the firmament,
stung with electric
raging with light,
ringing its voice
soft,
true,
into the wind,
unbuffeted by eddy or current.

I prostrated, a child, against the spaces of others,
my circle ever smallening,
bit myself cold with guilt over taking too much,
giving too little,
shrinking from the wound of father left in mother,
the mockingbird that sings the car alarm,
the song of another,
anything but his own.
My hand shook when I reached out of cloud cover
into the world,
withered under the light,
a specimen even I gazed down upon,
a collapsed and writhing lung.

Enough of this smallness,
this “no”.
This effacement into nothing,
this voice that questions every golden word,
the call of my culture to hold my margins and save my ink,
this lump in my shining throat,
this tail between ranging legs,
crowned head hung low,
this amputation of my bursting flesh,
the story that binds me in the valley,
I am me,
and I will be.

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