Prison of the Mind

Prison of the Mind

“Thy body is a temple” so sayest the Lord thy God

My temple is no longer a place of worship

There is no savior to rid it of the impurities

No. My demons keep my temple

They build a fortress around the soul

They hold poison in the corner of my heart and fortify the mind with blades to cut anyone who dare tries to enter

 

I’m held prisoner in my mind

And I have given up on the fairy tale lies of saving

There is no prince, no knight, no storming armies to defeat what I believe to be undefeatable

None are close enough to help

Even those I consider closest only stay in the lobby of the prison.

I furnish it with friendship, and supposed sympathy

But I lock them from the center, from the love

Something I am not capable of

 

I can’t even conceive the possibility that someone would want to love me

How can I?

The love for myself has long been gone

And this leaves me incapable of hating others

Because there is no one I hate more than myself

 

I’m a slave to the idea that I have created

I know what I believe is not so but that does not change the intensity of its reality

That does not change the insecurities that leave me empty

Hating the image of myself I break mirrors because my life is already bad luck

 

I look down to my arms covered in scars that I’ve picked

They are a release that no blade can match

Their genesis is unknown to me

But I crave the need to let their presence grow

quitting is no longer an option

Another demon I can not conquer

Another challenge I can’t face.

 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

By that I’m the sanest of them all

I let people in with the preconceived notion that I’ve already lost them

Wrapping my thoughts into towers of barbed wire

Sure to hurt anyone within

None may enter, I can not leave

 

My guards stand over me with fear as their weapon

In here I have the comfort of an escaped reality

Out there is a whirlwind of uncertainty

The consequences of decisions I have yet to choose loom over me with threats of possible suffering  

 

Garden of the soul

But wait

As I look through the bars of my cell upon the guards that keep me here

I see that they are empty

The fear is merely a trick upon my mind, breeding a fabled insanity

The scars that I scrape now are out of habit and not necessity

 

The fortress I have lived my life in crumbles in front of me

Instead now before me is unmatchable beauty

I have found my Eden

 

True, I have taken part of the forbidden fruit, but my soul stays standing

All that is remaining are the fragile pieces of a broken past

Forever staying, but no longer defining

I have dived down into the belly of the beast and have returned a warrior

Capable of shattering the walls placed around me

 

For the first time in my life, I have found serenity

I can define my destiny

My life is not a carbon copy of those before me

But instead is a beautiful collage swept together in the garden of my soul

The me of the present and the me of the past are not one and the same

One can not live without the other

 

A soul mirrored my own, but carried his own set of weights

A phenomenon I never thought possible

He took me in, clothed me in love, and fed me security

Placed me in a home, that I now think of as family

He took up my pieces one by one and placed them as best as he could

I’ll forever be cracked, but no longer broken.