You may strip me to the bone and examine my every part

Go ahead and remove my soul

While I pray to GOD that I will let go

Of all my insecurities

And my bad qualities

And a broken back that will not stop me.

Though depression is gone anxiety still looms when I’m all alone

In case you were even wondering.

 

I admit that I’m still stuck in a fantasy of

Disney princesses and fictional readings and

I just want to be loved but

I’ve never been kissed and I’ve never kissed.

And then there is

My religion—the greatest part of me—

That presses perfection while I remove it from myself.

I know that God is okay with all my effort and

Christ

--You wouldn’t believe how much I love Him—

Has used His sacrifice to cover my faults and save me.

 

So I am not my faults.

And I am not my problems

And I am not the years of balancing on a cliff regretting the distance too afraid to jump and yet

Too afraid to stay.

 

I am the beauty I have grown into,

With curly hair,

Teal eyes,

A rockin’ body,

And movement that would make anyone feel the something that I’ve been trying to feel for years.

I am constant motion and a brilliant heart filled with the passion of loving dance and helping people.

And I

I am the daughter of a divine being.

 

I don’t regret turning religious on you:

All “Jesus Christ” and “I am saved,”

Because you asked to research my bones and remove my soul and there it is in all its glory.

If I avoided it, I would be lying and you would know

Because it is the truth intricately carved into the structural part of me

That you are oh-so-carefully examining.

 

But I am even more than religion and beauty.

Though most of me is always dancing,

I also spend the day hallucinating based on the black ink that I find on a dead tree

And pouring over assigned readings while I study the lives of people very unlike me

And taking on new personalities and knowing each one intimately.

I have written this poem over and over and over and over again

Trapping myself within the lines of a page

In the feeling of a stage

And wrapping myself up in the grime and the bodies of a dance floor.

 

I am also made up of so many dreams:

One million impossible goals.

There is a woman who is knee deep in the mess of others’ poverty

Merely attempting to help them out.

With all her success and all her failures

She, I know, is me.

At least eventually.

 

In the end,

When I have built myself into these goals

While Christ fills my holes,

I will still be made up of excitement and hyper bottled up into a mess of words

Falling out of my mouth before I can think.

But for now they’re falling onto this page,

And I will soon carve them into my soul where they will stay and say:

 

“This is only the beginning.”