The Confessional Within

It begins with a match, striking it against the raw flesh of my own skin,

pretending the flame belongs to someone else,

a neighbor, a boss, a lover, anyone but me.

The smoke curls upward, like an excusatory hiss,

etching the ceiling’s drywalls,

thin as spider silk, fragile enough to break under the weight of truth.

Soon the match becomes a torch,

and I carry it through the rooms of my life,

blistering the wallpaper of domestic peace,

its heat blaming the air for being too still.

too ordinary,

too much like me.

I say the fire was theirs,

their neglect, their betrayal, their silence,

but the ash clings to my hands,

black fingerprints on every door I close.

The torch grows into a furnace,

a machine I feed with resentment,

with every failed paycheck,

every unopened letter,

every sigh that echoes in the kitchen.

I shovel blame like coal,

telling myself the engine belongs to

the world’s rusted boiler in my throat,

not to the trembling architect inside my chest.

And then the furnace becomes a storm,

a gale that shreds my ledger into wings,

flying through the streets of my mind.

I accuse the wind of cruelty,

the rain of conspiracy,

the thunder of indifference,

but it is my own breath that fuels the cyclone,

my own refusal to stand still.

Yet even storms collapse,

their rage dissolving into silence.

I crawl from the wreckage,

skin torn like old paper,

eyes raw as peeled fruit.

Survival is not triumph,

it is the stubborn act of breathing

when the lungs are full of smoke.

I see now: the match,

the torch, the furnace, the storm,

all born from my own hand,

my own hunger to escape the mirror.

And though I blamed the world,

the world never struck the spark.

Surviving oneself asks one

rise, not whole, not healed, but aware,

like a tree charred by lightning,

still rooted,

still reaching upward,

its branches scarred,

yet stubbornly alive.