Funny how something you thought was helping you
operate in this place was the twig in the spokes,
friction in your free-fall, blunting your edges.
Its light was shadow, just a different kind,
throwing shade all over your most lustrous moments,
hottest pathways.
But they’ve been overgrown for years,
with the thick vines and weeds of your vices,
and every time you trimmed them,
hacked away on the raging days,
they grew back heavier and thicker,
freshly infused with your anxious rot
and self-defacing lies.
Your mind can do the hedge-work
and art-work all at once, only not forever.
There will always be days when
the past grows back, now a forest,
because you’ve not been as observant,
as dilligent and careful as you should have.
But all it takes is a mindset switch-up,
the gall to gaze a little longer from the towers
of a different kind of fresh start.
