Tracing it back...

There was a day, lost now in the ocean that I might have been normal.  I can't put my finger on when it might have been, but I imagine at some point half naked, throwing mud-clots at my best-friend, father in his workshed and mother in her kitchen I had a true shot at being like the people I pass on the street every day.

At night, as we lie in our bed, even with our voices crying out loud the spiritual importance of who we are we wonder;

"Is this a huge mistake?"

I have no compunctions.  I do what I do because something inside me is broken.  Like a story of someone with a gift, and a brain-tumor responsible for it, I know that the spectrum shifts and the light bends.  I know I see deeper.

I know I still miss much.

What is sincerity, here.  What is this that I am giving?  Is it my heart?  Is it simply a series of skills taught to me by the world mimicked back, the human ape repeating the path of least resistance down the maze to the endorphine dispenser?

Or have I stumbled across the prism and found a gate that isn't there.  Am I truly an instrument of communion?  Or is this just the shape in answer to the light, a different light, not even a better light, just a different shade.

I worry for the people that love me.  The more they love me the more I worry.

I have not been treated with a gentle hand by the world.  I will not here begin an operetta of the tragedies of my life, but there are things in it that I would have run screaming from, anyone would have run screaming from, but found myself backed against the brick wall of blood and therefore balked.  I balked for my youth, I balked for my nievete and was shoved head-first into the organ grinder that would spit me out this collection of iron rods fueled by the thermite of my searching soul.

I am Satyr.  But I am Midas too.  And my hands shake for fear of gilding the ones I'd touch, and by that gleaming kill something soft inside, something human that I'd dispensed with for the wounded morals of survival, beguilement, and the supression of so much rage.

So much rage.

But the smile never faulters, and the eyes gleam.  His nails are always dirty and his hair when he had it was always wild.  It is the definition that found me, and in my way I've become happy with my destiny and the way I point.  The path I lead to.  The violence now is only one of chemicals, I have channeled it into something else.

But sometimes at night, laying in my bed I wonder;

With so different a perspective, at what point does even my understanding of things like love and friendship become skewed.  My heart is tender for the ones that I love.

My heart is tender and I cry when they cry and I hold thier hand when they need it and speak soft words that I swear to christ are all sincere.  I rage at them when they make me angry because I would not see them fall and I dote on them like some vengeful golem-

But we all know I am not a true man, and I live in dread of the other shoe-drop.  I am terrified, and even that feeds me.

I have channeled it into something else.

So I cross myself and say a prayer, clutch the pictures to my chest and stare down the mirrors edge to the half-naked boy in a mud-clot war with his best friend, dirty nails and blood-soaked scalp from close-scrapes.  A smile wide as a fault.

I wonder if that boy had a better understanding of love, than this man.