Elsewhere

Our lives are inundated with rules, expectations, pre-conceived ideas and pressures to be something other than what or who we are.  We are led down long, exhausting paths that find us traveling further and further away from your true selves.  Media, politics, religion and our workplaces are some of the culprits.  Some people can’t be who they truly are at work for fear of being ostracized or not fitting in, some live double lives based on family ideologies and strict religious direction, some exist to simply please others because they have no idea they are able to choose for themselves.  I’ve seen it all.  It’s sad and frightening.  We are only on this earthly plane for such a brief time and it is an unhappy verity to know there are so many of us living by someone else’s trend instead of our own.  Time and time again, I’ve been cultured by wise humans to never suppress the characteristics of my true self in exchange for someone else’s preference.  The older I get, the more I heed the advice.  It started with writing.  Learning now to not censor myself in case someone I loved may take offense or issue with what was put on paper.  It’s probably the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned and has spilled over into other areas of my life.  From there, I’ve tried incredibly hard to maintain that attitude in my relationships with other people and the world.  Relationships with other people can be a challenge since there are several who are still living their lives based on what others believe they should be doing or thinking, who they should love or not love etc, it is terribly hard to break through their barriers and much of it has to do with debilitating fear on their part.  My relationship with the world is much less taxing.  I have come to trust my own voice, my own opinions, beliefs because I listen and learn and contemplate before I decide how to proceed, whatever it is.  I have had people fall away from my life because we don’t agree or enjoy the same things or even though we both believe in God I choose to follow my faith in my own heart instead of inside a church.  That being said, I’d happily congregate with anyone in their place of worship to broaden my perspective and who knows, maybe my spiritual serenity would truly be discovered.  However, because of such rigid black and white ways of thinking, the one invitation I so desperately wanted never came and truthfully now that I have some space and perspective, there isn’t room in my pro-happiness, free-thinking all-encompassing goodness-filled life for those so shallow, narrow-minded, so caught up, so judgmental and for what?  Someone else’s opinion of what they should be doing?  Boring.

At any rate, this poem is written with all of those things in mind.  That it is so damn confusing to choose what and who to believe in, and how and really shouldn’t be.  I vote for believing in myself.  You should too.  Don’t accept someone else’s dogma because of tradition or family obligation, don’t accept an opinion if it isn’t truly yours and don’t waste your time not being a whole person, splitting yourself into pieces to fit into certain folds.  It’s a waste of precious time and a detriment to your uniqueness, the one who really matters and the one who deserves the world. 

Stand up for yourself, for who you are, as you are, not how someone wants you to be.  You rule. 

/rant

Elsewhere

behave cautiously

tethered to instructions

consider the act of suffering

through opportune margins

but resist

& look instead toward

the ribald ruins of poetry

for customary questions

& anticipated demands

slender queries

yet prosperous

with definitive conclusions

full of raw luster

& human guise

believe everything

is insufficiently inadequate

choose elusive uncertainty

bound to pastel commands

deliberate reverse happenchance

through unfavorable boundaries

but repel

& seek instead the stillness

of stretched sentences

audible only to you

(be tangled

elsewhere)

anywhere but here

with anyone but them

**

Over and out.

In propinquity,

Nic