deliverance

MISERY

I want

to strangle 

the sun

so the rest

of the world

can experience

the darkness

that dwells

inside 

me.

I don’t have a super dramatic testimony filled with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  I came to Christ at the beginning of high school.  However I was always “a good kid,” the kind you hope your children make friends with.  I know this because I had numerous parents take me into their confidence to inform me how glad they were that so-and-so decided to hang out with me, I was such a great influence, etc.  I took that to mean I was exceedingly less cool than all their other friends, but that is a subject for another time.  

Yesterday when I was cleaning my room, I found this poem taped to my wall behind a shelf.  I didn’t write it, but I remember reading it in middle school and relating so much, frantically cutting it out with squiggly scissors, thinking, “finally, someone understands me!”   I have no idea who wrote it, but I feel like if Satan himself wrote a poem, it might sound exactly like this.  Reading it again with that interpretation, it frightens me.  It also frightens me that at one point I aligned myself so strongly with its sentiments.  

I had a blessed childhood; I don’t exactly know what happened.  I just remember feeling so dead inside and so alone, constantly overwhelmed with feelings that were suffocating me.  I had no vocabulary for what I was supposed to overcome nor power or purpose to overcome it if I knew.  All I knew is that I wanted desperately to be happy, or at least for someone to understand how miserable I was.  I would have sold my soul for that.      

I easily could have become the kind of poet that spews poison into the world in the guise of art, perhaps in far more sublimated and sophisticated ways than my early work, but it could have happened.  Christ did not directly deliver me from rampant sex or heavy drug use, but He did deliver me from some wretched poetry which is a manifestation of the same lostness.  

Sometimes I still write really bad poetry and sometimes I am sad, but it is altogether a different breed of sad and bad, and for that I am eternally thankful.