Awakened

MY PAST WEAKNESS

My face now

has become a stranger

to the face I once knew.

Mouths have a lot

of criticism to say,

mouths that have brains,

yet somehow

their brains are not connected

to the words they release.

When I got to the valley of evil,

I met family and friends,

but I feared all evil.

I searched for something steady,

something that would not move

when everything around me did.

Only the Unmovable Mover was with me.

When I speak,

they tend to want to clip my mouth,

as though my voice

is something they can silence.

But I am bigger than their clips.

I did nothing

to maintain that old face.

That face was innocent and meek,

a face that knew little

about the cruelty of the world.

It trusted easily.

It forgave quickly.

It stayed quiet

when silence seemed safer.

But those same mouths

that once shut me

pulled the wolf out of the pup.

And now they want to tame

what they helped create.

They forget

that the aim of training

is to make something better,

not weaker.

And if the aim of killing something

is for it never to wake again,

then why did they awaken

something stronger instead?

They pushed and pushed,

expecting the old me

to remain beneath their hands.

But the old me is gone.

Something new has awakened,

and I will guard this new “I”

with everything I have.

Not because I hate

the person I used to be,

but because I refuse

to make the same mistake twice.

I will not abandon myself

just to make others comfortable.

The face they see now

is the face their actions created.

And this time,

I will not let anyone

take it away from me.