There’s an alleyway in everyone’s mind where resides disease, hate, scars;

I am immune to the alleyway – I wave good morning into the dark and wave goodnight as I trudge by.

Growing up is learning to corral your demons and face them head on;

Adulthood is about being scared of the life inside of you

That someone instead controls;

I can feel the marionette strings digging, cutting through my flesh;

The rotten scent permeates my being and I know the limbs are dead.

Life is knowing when to hack away at the dead skin cells;

Every seven years your body will be completely new, a brand new person;

The disease, the hate, the scars will bleed out, will cede, will fade

But I have to be alive;

I don’t need rotted blackened tortured limbs stringing along behind me.

I wish to be a free bird;

I sing behind the steel bars curved around me, molded by someone else;

A bird has two wings and two feet;

They have defied the odds of gravity and weight;

I choose to be the bird;

I soar across the blues when I so choose.

I am no longer a puppet in a shadow box someone puts on;

I am the engineer that has computed the science of my cage, my strings;

And now I am in control;

Watch me take off high, high into the sky;

Watch me.