I walked for three years in the shadow of a giant in my own mind

To worship idols is blashphemous

Concern eats away at me because my religion is others other than myself. I learned to seek comfort in souls aside from the one that my parents bought and paid for in that small hospital room upstate nearly twenty two years ago. 

I have neglected my spirit for so long that it is an atrophied aura crying out for that soul food I deny it. Not mac and cheese or biscuits and gravy but peace. A peace found in my own abilities. 

If you looked under the special skills in my resume you would read that I can love, like the flood brought on by that forty day rainstorm that bore a rainbow at the end of its life. But when will I let this precipitation wash over my own body, rinsing away the oily insecurities from the plumage I hide out of fear. 

“I have a dream”, he said, but he forgot to ask “what is yours”. When will I realize the dream I set out to accomplish so long ago. Maybe I will never get there, not because I tried and failed, but because I see that when you accomplished your dream, you had to look behind you to the pock marked battle field of shot up relationships and promises tattered like the battle worn flag staked into the summit of my heart.

But now it is time for me to reclaim that square foot of real estate, to renew the battlefield and reset the tape deck in my mind. I begin to record new mantras that will lift me back up to new heights, like the fate I cooked up as a child, believing with all my heart that I was the real Rocketeer and I would one day soar to the stratosphere with the flip of a switch. 

I make the decision to push the big red button, and it starts. 

My subconscious ceases and I can finally hear the outside world again.