"What Scale Measures My Worth?" by Kaitlin Butler
Is it a car ride straight to the middle of nowhere
With someone basking in sunlight holding an unlit match
Waiting for me to say the wrong thing so they can burn their ties?
Or the voices that feed my innermost fears
Saying I am annoying, unappealing, needing to be fixed,
And needing to fit their acceptance, because without it, what am I?
Stifling standards of affection drip from the mouths
of busted hearts held together by fool鈥檚 gold and string, waiting
for someone to fix the same mess they inflict on those not yet scarred like them.
I can鈥檛 help but think my vision is skewed. That
Worth is supposed to be what He ingrained in me
To bring a smile to His face with every swoop of an eyelid
And every shutter of my voice from a heart
that quakes for the lonely and the beauty of a gentle
And quiet spirit that is worth loving despite my doubts it can be so, yet
I strip myself down to a mundane mix
Of people with hearts shredded as fine as mine and wonder why
I can鈥檛 ever hear passed a cacophony of collaborative hate against me
and them for being the voices chanting my own fears.
I assume their cries rise from a superior place of confidence
And ignore the sparks building fires until corpses start burning a lot like theirs.
I鈥檇 rather be alive than cremated in a fire culture calls beautiful.