For my friends and readers, don't panic, while this post is a little dark, I am not talking to or about myself here. This is a combination of to someone and a writing assignment. all is well. here. xox

Poetry doesn't make anything better.  Pain is pain, even when it’s depicted in pretty turns of phrase.  I read it because it brought joy to ones I have loved at one time or another. Some of it I understood, some I just tried to, and some I just hated. I always felt guilty about it.

I always felt guilty about it, but it didn’t change the fact that I hated it. Not with poetry or with anything else.  My brother used to say that worry was the greatest sin – it has no power to change anything, it’s only accomplishment is your prolonged suffering. As trite as it is the only thing that changes anything is time. The bitch of that is, when pain is involved, time crawls like a turtle through peanut butter.

Like a turtle through peanut butter and you know if you make it out, and into the capable hands of your rescuers, you’ll be forever changed.  It’s a lie to believe that change is always a good one.  Not all change is caterpillar to butterfly, and much of it comes with a feeling akin to chewing broken glass.

Chewing broken glass, or just on the pieces of disappointment that follow a failure, a loss, a broken heart, won’t wipe you out, but I know you won’t be able to convince yourself of that at 2:30 in the morning when you’re busy choking on the blood of those past mistakes.

Those past mistakes, they only matter to you.  Second chances and second guesses never served anyone.  Don’t torture yourself reliving a handful of good moments plucked from a decade of pain.

Plucked from a decade of pain, the voice in your head works hard to cut you to ribbons. Quiet it, with the truth – nothing else will do. You didn’t earn this and it’s not your job to hold it.  

It’s not your job to hold it anymore than it’s my job to fix it. It doesn’t matter how I phrase it, pain isn't pretty even in a sonnet.