No One Can Take Away Your Magic
Not the teenager who forced you into sex. Your absent parents. Your nasty teachers. Your misguided friends. Even your infuriating neighbors. So you’ve been misunderstood. Minimized. Berated. Magic finds a secluded spot and returns when it’s quiet. So your parents throw plates at each others’ heads and scream obscenities. Magic waits, and in the morning on the way to school, she shows you the baby bird’s nest. You so want to trust she won’t disappear on you. You think someone might steal her, or beat her up, or tell her lies, or she’ll get sick of you. Poor sweet child. Who taught you any worthy trust?
You learned to trust by watching magic disappear. Suddenly, like a startled animal in the woods. You learned a gentleness which could only come from fear. Animals trust as they intuit your essence. I mean no harm. I am utterly trustworthy. To sit in peace, you must spend some time in fear (fear for your life, not made up hob goblins). Only then can you understand the magnitude of your choice. Do you really want to live that way? Under fear’s suffocating blanket? With no hope of ever feeling anything is right? With no magic?
I have never lived by rules. I do what I must to be ‘civilized’ but I’ve never been meekly led. Spare me your dogma and diatribes. If it makes sense to me I’ll do it. Not because *you* do, or the neighbors do, or my doctor said, or all the studies prove… (i leave the Bible out of this. The literal/figurative argument. I wasn’t there, I cannot say. It’s sacred, it’s both, that seems settled enough for me).
I don’t know how to end this poem (sure it’s a poem. Friends call them many things: musings, soliloquy, meanderings, reflections). Don’t let anyone steal your magic (it can’t be stolen). Wherever you’re tempted to say, “You wrecked it” keep looking. Sit quietly, and like an animal in the woods, it will return to you.
LBM 7/3/2018
