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Prison of the Mind
“Thy body is a temple” so sayest the Lord thy God
My temple is no longer a place of worship
There is no savior to rid it of the impurities
No. My demons keep my temple
They build a fortress around the soul
They hold poison in the corner of my heart and fortify the mind with blades to cut anyone who dare tries to enter
I’m held prisoner in my mind
And I have given up on the fairy tale lies of saving
There is no prince, no knight, no storming armies to defeat what I believe to be undefeatable
None are close enough to help
Even those I consider closest only stay in the lobby of the prison.
I furnish it with friendship, and supposed sympathy
But I lock them from the center, from the love
Something I am not capable of
I can’t even conceive the possibility that someone would want to love me
How can I?
The love for myself has long been gone
And this leaves me incapable of hating others
Because there is no one I hate more than myself
I’m a slave to the idea that I have created
I know what I believe is not so but that does not change the intensity of its reality
That does not change the insecurities that leave me empty
Hating the image of myself I break mirrors because my life is already bad luck
I look down to my arms covered in scars that I’ve picked
They are a release that no blade can match
Their genesis is unknown to me
But I crave the need to let their presence grow
quitting is no longer an option
Another demon I can not conquer
Another challenge I can’t face.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results
By that I’m the sanest of them all
I let people in with the preconceived notion that I’ve already lost them
Wrapping my thoughts into towers of barbed wire
Sure to hurt anyone within
None may enter, I can not leave
My guards stand over me with fear as their weapon
In here I have the comfort of an escaped reality
Out there is a whirlwind of uncertainty
The consequences of decisions I have yet to choose loom over me with threats of possible suffering
Garden of the soul
But wait
As I look through the bars of my cell upon the guards that keep me here
I see that they are empty
The fear is merely a trick upon my mind, breeding a fabled insanity
The scars that I scrape now are out of habit and not necessity
The fortress I have lived my life in crumbles in front of me
Instead now before me is unmatchable beauty
I have found my Eden
True, I have taken part of the forbidden fruit, but my soul stays standing
All that is remaining are the fragile pieces of a broken past
Forever staying, but no longer defining
I have dived down into the belly of the beast and have returned a warrior
Capable of shattering the walls placed around me
For the first time in my life, I have found serenity
I can define my destiny
My life is not a carbon copy of those before me
But instead is a beautiful collage swept together in the garden of my soul
The me of the present and the me of the past are not one and the same
One can not live without the other
A soul mirrored my own, but carried his own set of weights
A phenomenon I never thought possible
He took me in, clothed me in love, and fed me security
Placed me in a home, that I now think of as family
He took up my pieces one by one and placed them as best as he could
I’ll forever be cracked, but no longer broken.
