I wanted to be built like the sleek creature for hunting, or an elegant light beauty made delicate wings born for flight. Instead I was shaped to be an animal of burden.

My neck and back lack grace, curved from the weight of years spent caring for the ungrateful and perhaps even the undeserving.

Their selfishness bore a bowed arc into my legs, crooked with the guilt laid thick onto me stacked under my skin, layers of fat to protect me from their hold, and I am carrying so much load, my age ridden joints threaten to buckle and fold.

My strength is their excuse to not hold their own while I plow the fields, tend to providing the source of sustenance they happily take.

Still I refuse to groan about how alone I truly am. I’ve built a quiet intimacy with the dark. The solitude at the end of the day is more refuge than prison, the way captivity kills off the fight in the instinct.

The poison fills the well, and the panic rings distantly from my stall, I tell myself repeating that it does not concern me if it’s not right in front of me.

Mediocrity is a hole I peer thru with the comfort of a skin, as I chew the food I’m given, tasteless made to give me strength to perform another day.

The New Moon gestated the questions, until the full Moon ovulated suspended, and hung in the silence, loud and pregnant with answers. The sadness of all that’s never been for me envelopes all my being to focus myself down into a point, one I made with single-minded vision.

If I am ever free, will I still know how to be me? Who am I past service and chains?