Dancing on the Hearth of Your Enemy

It is evil.
Disregard what the textbooks say,
it is more than chemicals and response
to traumas old and new.
It is evil,

A thief of color and light,
of life and joy and all good things.
It kills.
I have seen it.
I have felt its knife and the slow leeching
of the soul’s blood.

I watched it kill my father,
and wound all he touched.
I have seen my own blood drip away,
tied to my chair,
tied to my bed,
tied by its ropes.

But I am an implacable foe.
I will not die, born
with a head more stubborn than my father’s
and a heart nearly as soft as my mother’s,
I persist,
and out of sight I live beyond the wounds,
calling on a strength beyond my own,
I break the bonds.

Perhaps only for this day.
Perhaps only for this moment.
but still, I cast them aside.
I mock them.
I sing.
I have the audacity to dance,
laughing like a child at a wedding,
uninhibited

and free.

About this poem

A medium bad bout of depression this morning. And the bible verse about David dancing as he returned the art of the covenant (2nd Samuel 6:14) back to Jerusalem that left me dancing a jig of my own.

Take that big boy. I got stuff to do.

Tom