Chimene, Devenir

Your life's promise comes after a fight. Heritage is either a casual happening or legitimacy fought for to redirect a generations' trajectory. What you fight for becomes your child.

So much depends on your movement. So much depends on your stillness. Be careful of noise that disracts your discernment.

Sometimes they get rid of you when they realize they can't hurt you.

It's come to the place where the only real thing is truth. Too much has happened to make resilience fatiguable; to make scars unheal. It's come to this place: this Here and Now too laden with zygotes fathered by Future and determined like the ocean tides. It's come to the ledge where timelessness of a childlike soul meets the quickened pace of time demanding fiduciary returns.

What's darker than dawn? Doubt.

And I tell myself to stop frustrating with growing wings, pattering with growing things, worrying that a smattering will never multiply to feed the multitudes, and fretting that peace won't follow nights of broken breathing.

I could have let purity go to waste by chasing after 1 billion tarnishing things in hopes of being validated by one and planning my 30 days with contrition afterwards. I could have surrendered gravity to drift around a place that couldn't handle me and excuse it as exploration. With practice and relentless games of truth and dare I could've chosen hospitality at the expense of sacredness just to "stay"; or security at the cost of lesser-used anatomy whose value I have yet to perceive. I could've accepted so many parts riddled with holes someone told me were there just to let light through. Here in what seems to be no man's land I have said "no" to so many things (and have been rejected by many others) with the barely-translated anticipation of accepting something that will say my name the way it's meant to be pronounced. Some heavy yet unfathomable glory; an untouchable light; something dear and heavy, pure and severe. There must be a reason why I have been spared by a multitude of almosts.

You forgot to remember. The noise doesn’t tell you what you need to hear. The quiet, the faint, the barely perceptible? You must unlearn despising it with irreverant impatience. It created you.

Knees worn from regimented bowing to gods not your own, voice cracked from overuse, back split from generationally cyclical movement with head down and eyes closed (some call it prayer). We have taught our fire to cook their food, have beaten our swords into plows on land that isn’t ours, have taken what’s hours and bought them time. Earth cringes at its descendants opening its silt layers...just to bury their dead.

Acknowledging the places where we have separated ourselves from ourselves, our vocal recollections of these surgical geographies become didactic statements. We reflect to keep from seeing our old frames, old skins; expired, retired souls as art. Atlases’ pages defaced with unapologetic red paint forming resolve with a slash: these are mounted and never regarded again. .

Affection forms after rehearsal. Rehearsal makes room for repitition and eventual return. The expired parts of our journey are restricted from view after transformation. Once lesson learned splices a gene, we can nolonger see what we have already seen. We nolonger understand the languages of what has been. We nolonger poise ourselves as divine beings renewed only by receiving forgiveness.