Inconsequentially Conscious

Location

Ruston, LA
2511 Foxx Creek Drive
United States
35° 36' 17.964" N, 97° 28' 49.3536" W

I'm a product of my enviornment, in the sweetest sense. 

My face is scratched-- from that time that neighbor cat clawed me.

My skull is dented-- from the time that neighbor kid hit me with me a golf club, an inch from my retromandibular. An inch from life to dead.

My back reads like a braille epic, detaling a war of attrition against a formidable enemy: acne. Detailing a life marred by self-consciousness, a life marred by self-appointed disappointment. 

But what's a scar if not a lesson? If not a battle-won or  battle-lost? If not a moment of blessed bifurcation, of tumultuous telemetry? 

Pain, tides, and the moons fade, and the mangled marks that men inflict upon men weather, but their lessons remain. 

I am a product of my environment. 

Taught to stand with pride, and to value what's been given to you-- your happy hearth, your precious education, much too intellectual for the most precocious, much too concrete for the most wearied, and the boundless blessings bestowed upon you-- I am unique. 

I am six feet of wrought-iron and steel. 

I am mule-headed and obsequious, relaxed yet stubborn. 

I carry hands that tremor, but only because Caliope and Erato guide them so feverishly, blazening my pen to write what the bards couldn't. 

And the head bleeds providential wisdom. 

Of which, I am sure, has never uttered such a simple, albeit poignant, paroxysm: The physical can never define me.

My scars slink off into a desperately dreary corner of an unknown realm of Hell as my mind bursts into the Empyrean. 

As my mind remains, undeniably, flawless.

 

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