Bleeding To Life

Would it be better if I spoke freely? If I said what I felt when I felt it? Zero levels of sensitivity?

I mean I try to say things that won’t hurt or offend others and won’t make me people look at me like a monster but it’s becoming harder. To contain everything I want to unleash. To say what really matters to me. To be the person I want to be.

But people prefer when I speak like this
When I don’t say what I want to say
Rather what they want me to say or be
Even if it’s not necessarily me

And that’s when I bleed.

Not the blood of the cycle that our sisters suffer
But the blood of a man who doesn’t want to suffer
The blood of a boy who thought he should’ve been aborted
The blood of a teen who didn’t think his life was important

Silence is a blade in my life. It’s basically a knife. Every time I’m forced to shut my mouth, I feel like I’ve been stabbed. Like I’ve been grabbed and taken to a torture facility. It’s killing me. These feelings. The ones that I’m hiding. The ones that no one ever hears and the ones that I fear.

I can never let it all out and it just lashes out at me. It makes me suffer for its lack of liberty. It’s desire to be free. It’s discomfort with residing in me. It’s menacing. Thrashing and gnashing away at my sanity. My humanity.

And I continue to bleed.

It’s made me darker.
Made me much harder
To love and to live with
Made me question everything I’m filled with

My faith and it can’t even co-exist
I can’t say what I want so I blame God for it
He’s never left me but I have to ask, why did he watch me plead?
Why did he watch me bleed?

Like the woman who bled for 12 years.
I've been bleeding for 18.
Hoping someone would save me.
It was driving me crazy.

But he sent me my tool, my gift and my liberty. My poetry and what it does for me. Cause I am not the only thing that bleeds. No, my pen does too. Witness what I wrote for you. It’s all true and it’s my blood. The blood that I could never shed publicly. It’s finally left me.

Rendering me a boy who could never speak
And a man who no one would listen to
I discovered what I liked to do
And it’s writing to you

I bleed no more.

As a man who suffered from that which would’ve remained unsaid, I was bleeding to death on this deathbed. But as a poet who is finally able to be free and say what I have to say, I’m shedding this blood today.

No longer full of darkness or strife.

No longer bleeding to death.

I’m bleeding to life.