This one goes out to our souls.
To all of you wrestling with Demon X.
It’s not a story where the hero rises, faces the foe and finds a way to win despite all obstacles.
I think it’s a story where the hero never slays the antagonist. Best case scenario: he walks wounded and stumbles on surprise flowers between the cracks in the concrete.
Alcoholics will be surrounded by oceans of booze today. Indulgent spreads will brutally try the restraint of food addicts. Smoke will rise from patios. The less fortunate will freeze in shadows. Drugs will happen. Some to shoot loneliness between the eyes. Some to take the edge off other addictions.
Some of us will fail utterly. Some of us will sip coffee and put another X on the calendar. Some of us will fall somewhere in the middle. But we will all feel the same broken. We will all press our palms over the same wound.
I have no poems for you. No clever quotes. No god damn memes.
You are the poem I want to read. And I do quietly every night. I read your stories and find them beautiful. Especially the ones where you fail utterly and yet there he or she is, that pretty soul of yours still screaming at you, at all of us, from some kind of parallel universe: please don’t stop trying.
What a gorgeous creature. It looks so lost, all but dead, bleeding out; but if you set your index on its wrist, guess what? It’s alive.
You are so tragically, beautifully alive.
I see you out there. And you’re beautiful. And you are absolutely Loved.
Yours,
Sp
Sobriety Poet 