I am not just kind
I am aware
I am aware of my thoughts, my motives, my inclinations
My doubts, my worries, my fears
My loves
My woes
My struggles
My hopes
I am not just kind
I am open
I am open to my frailties, my flaws, my imperfections
I am open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and experiencing
I am open to radical change
In myself, in the world, in another
I am not just kind
I am wild
I am wildly compassionate, a fierce defender of the voiceless
A reckoning to the lonely, a chasm to the fear bound
I am wild in my imaginings, creation, connections
My loves
My woes
My struggles
My hopes
I am not just kind
I am strong
I am powerful in my convictions
I am powerful in my abilities
I am powerful in my attitude
I am strong in what I choose to take in, and in what I choose
To leave behind
I am strong in my determination to be the best I know to be
In my realization that I am enough
And that we are enough
I am not just kind
I am finely tuned
I am tuned with the precision of decades of introspection
I am tuned with eons of acceptance
I am tuned with the grace of self-dignity
My adobe is the musical reef
My loves
My woes
My struggle
My hopes
I am not just kind
I am a fortune
I am a boundless treasure, transmuted from the darkness
Upheld from the dungeon reserves
A fortune to be found and returned
To that which is
My loves
My woes
My struggle
My hopes
I am not just kind
We are all worthy.
We are all worthy of good.
We are all worthy of bad.
We are worthy of whatever is perceived, or not perceived, as the definition of good and bad.
We are worthy of what we measure others with and others by.
We are worthy of how we measure ourselves.
We are worthy of our thoughts, actions, and deeds.
We are worthy of what we put forth, what we take in, and what we hold most dear.
We are worthy of what we keep to ourselves, what we hold tight, what we fear the most of losing.
We are worthy of what we fear the most of revealing.
I know someone who is suffering
I know someone who is in chronic pain
I know someone who has chronic fatigue
I know someone who is searching for answers
I know someone who has gone through divorce
I know someone who is in an unhappy marriage
I know someone who longs to find a soul mate
I know someone who is alone
I know someone who has no one nearby
I know someone who searches for another
I know someone who cannot afford the mortgage
I know someone who cannot afford the rent
I know someone who is homeless
I know someone who longs to reconnect with family
I know someone who longs to be accepted by loved ones
I know someone who has been hurt by those most trusted
I know someone who has lost all siblings
I know someone who has lost a child
I know someone who has lost a partner
I know someone who is in search of work
I know someone who is burdened by a job
I know someone who isn’t recognized for abilities
I know someone who can’t control anger
I know someone who can’t control the body
I know someone who can’t control actions
I know someone who feels trapped in the wrong body
I know someone who feels trapped in the wrong gender
I know someone who feels trapped by society
I know someone who has been displaced
I know someone who has been ostracized
I know someone who is searching for community
I know someone who is losing the ability to remember
I know someone who is in the last stages of cancer
I know someone who is preparing to end this life
I know someone who feels unseen
I know someone who longs to be heard
I know someone who is tired of cruelty
I know someone who gets trapped in the mind
I know someone who gets fooled by thoughts
I know someone who battles voices that seem real
I know someone who lost a beloved pet
I know someone who lost a beloved possession
I know someone who lost a part of who they are
I know someone who battles addiction
I know someone who pangs to live in the moment
I know someone who doesn’t understand why life is unfair
I know someone who is suffering
Samantha Craft
December 2016
Everyone’s trying to be a rock star
They’re citing their flame
They’re playing with fire
Trimmed by the hour
Decking the halls with
Views and claimed power
Delving in
To bring out their source
The reason they think
And they think
And they state
That they are the right
And their person the good
Reclaiming in words
Regurgitation
Reclaiming in words
Regurgitation
Delightful
Fistfuls of theories
Be the millionth winner
In a game of a trillion
Dive up as a beauty
Hammer down as a vein
Throbbing with solution
Answers and games
Rows of screaming
Voices
One after one
Waving accolades
Of attention
Everyone’s trying to be a rock star
They’re citing their flame
They’re playing with fire
Trimmed by the hour
Decking the halls with
Views and claimed power
Where The Crow Feeds
There is a bitterness instilled and growing. A habitat of woes poured through the grout-laden tiles. Sacrificed as brine burdened tears and inched toward desert ground below. And here is where the crow feeds. Nestled against the marrow remains. Latched onto feathered-whispers meandering stretched out corridors. He caws. Cries out and pecks the places he exists. Broken, hallowed and shamed into boney crumbs. Comes again, the agony dance. A thousand droplets drenched cascade through victim chambers, round the bowels and out into the essence of darkness. Evaporated with each pressing. A salt-lathered stain against tainted black. Beak to bone. Talon to ash. Weathered door creaks opens to an endless echo of isolation. I am this shattered bird. I am this proclaimed prey. Slathered in likeliness, prancing round the corners, where burden lives. Shifted into form anew, turned into unfamiliar, still carrying the weariness of loss. I hear him clawing at the pieces below. Beneath the marble crushings—how he weeps. How he mars the destitute of his own hallowed out regions, emptied beyond starvation. The pool of self, shaken, moved and unmoved by worlds forgotten. Edged back, he endures, counting the ways in which his agony survives victor, in which his piercing eyes pierce that which is about, lavishing the view with what seems as bleakness awoken. Terrible he is, in his misery. But terrible worse is the way in which ‘what was’ has returned once more. Again, he calls out from beneath the remnants of fragmented substance. Devastated in a state of weary forlorn. Forgotten by self, and still there, in his sheltered state. “I am here,” he sings, from beyond the trees winter foliage, drenched in muted grey. “I am here,” the song carries, far above the collapsed sky. “I am here.” And his tears swallow themselves—one upon the next—tumbling gems catching the wind. If only he could see enough to lift his tethered eyes. If only he could hear his own song, seize the dying shell, and rise once more through scattered bones.
Samantha Craft
I am as the wind. I am the wind. And was the wind. Pressure pulled through, substance rallied and released, treasures unfolded, emptiness astounded. Less here than there, and summoned forward.
I am an eternal balancing beacon. Twice-revealed and mastered, rectified in my indignation, made whole in my completions, eradicated from the darkness. Tethered to what awaits.
I am human, made flesh and broken through. Divided into regions of unknown territory, sifted with flecks of gold into the adobe of awakening. Branded by self-made-self.
I am sight emerged, free to take what is and what isn’t. Seared at tattered seam, edged shut and welded wide to the masses. Prisms merged. Opaque glass pouring spectrums through high window.
I am everywhere and nowhere, and all at once I am splintered. Burst into centrifuge, cascaded upon the spawned pond of unraveled surrender. Pierced, as dawning gait emerged. Sunlight beckoning distant traveler.
I am the exact measure of awareness, bewildered by all, twisted into form, neither recognized nor denied, taken to the layers beneath the layers, the tunneled chambers of desires struck down and left flailing.
I am there, in the under regions, chasing my dreams as salmon-pink to pounding stream, pushing upwards upon a tear filled staircase to destiny. Standing, once-removed: birthing, dying and rising through the cycle.
I am there, some undone wind, seeping through the fissured stucco into the unyielding corridors of reason.
Samantha Craft
Everyday Aspergers the book available in 2016.
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Twitter: Samantha Craft @ aspergersgirls
I know what I am not but not what I am. I know when to stop but not when to stop starting. I can inch my way into the middle and get stuck in the molasses of neither here nor there. I don’t know how to swim upstream without pounding pain, and instead, in alternate route, float downstream away from the waters where all else abounds.
Somewhere I have forgotten myself, and I search to find her, thinking I have arrived, only to once more find I am at the backdoor looking into what was and thinking I had known then.
I cannot remember who or where I have been, anymore than I can visualize where I am going. I am lost, in a time maze of confusion, falling upon a self I cannot fathom or detect.
She is there, in the shadowed-tunnel, collapsing and reborn into another, faster than humanly feasible. She is multitudes unopened and reopened—an anomaly in form. To be and not to be. To care and not to care. To unravel into the very depths of reason and peer down into the pond of ‘me.’ Only to question what it is that stares back with such disregard and wonderment.
I am but enough and then I am unequivocally lacking, never measuring up to the enforced standards absorbed from the path I walk. I clamor for explanation and find a thousand books untouched, though in some fashion taken into the realm of reason. I can feel the words: the spoken, the whispered, the silenced, the ones that never came and ones that never speared the element that is I.
They make me. They form me. They penetrate me into something I know not. Clay to my mind. Dirt to my heart. Scattered residue of earthly wants and needs. Goods that I am neither capable of grasping or acquiring.
I am this existence that the observer watches. Reformed with the passerby. Morphed into their reality and then left, unscattered and splattered, broken and unbroken, in a pool of endless duality.
I am what I am—yet only for a fleeting moment; a chance to take glance towards the outline of my palm, the beat of my heart, the opening of a billion universes. Everywhere I am, and at once I am alone. Isolated. A loneliness no less difficult to explain than the essence of what I have become. ~ Sam, 7/24/15
Of She…
She mounts, as the tuft ribbon, torn
Riding the circumference of questioning
Mind turned, trembled-wavers
Across endless cause
I cannot, I can, I will, I shan’t
And over the mountain terrains
She treks
Feet, aching soles
Upon beaten battleground
Heart opening to the chasm of reason
She is, and she is not
Twisted and reborn into
This something new and un-new
Opened and closed
Reexamined and brought into the light
Distraught and brilliantly aware
Carrying the global basket, woes
Torrid tears racing down bones
Outlining, this shadowed-speaker
Born into prism
Walls, resurfaced and reshaped
Made into what almost is
Until fleeting moments weep away
Left idling, still,
In creviced thoughts
Of what has come
Fragmented semblance
Slivered whispers
Claimed identity
The torrential gathering
Of she
~ Sam, 7/25/15
The opinionated folk deems his self more worthy than the next, more educated, more correct, more substantiated in his tethered-viewings. He is the man who ties himself to his beliefs as marionette to the puppeteer. Surrendering his last performance for the making of a hopeful sequel.
He stands on the cornerstone of his own reality, perched on a soapbox made of rubbery-soles; erect in his being, creating hurts, as he plucks out the feathers from those deemed ‘wrong.’
He is the judge. And his seasoned-eyes seek out justice for self, and for self-proclaimed truths.
He creates chaos through the subconscious quest to establish an enemy in order to make himself the victor.
He seeks out that which is wrong to feed his own tattered ego.
The more he builds himself up, the more he merrily tears the others downward into spiraling nonsense.
He latches on to one truth, and then another, exchanging viewpoints to suit his individual needs. Adapting his ways to suit his desired outcome.
He eradicates plans and schemes, even as he sees this not as so.
He is blind to his own ways, and thinks himself clever and keen.
He has an eye for truth, and establishes his world as so. Truth begets truth and all else in dangerous makings of others’ minds.
He knows himself, inside and out, or so he thinketh . And in thinking in limited scope, he believes he sees the world about him endlessly.
He is the maker of mankind and the destroyer, and he sets himself on high while wearing a robe of futile-humility. Though, buried beneath the cloakings are the mere wobblings of brittle bones.
He erects flags of righteousness in his name.
He is the enemy of spirit, as he claims his views worthy and right.
He is the enemy of self, as he hides in the shadowed sands, head buried to the reality undone.
He builds and builds an illusion in order to feed and feed that which is established upon as self onto self.
He becomes that which he wishes, and has opinion for all that does not fit into his gently spawned parchment.
His arrows are as ink on treasure map, pointing thusly to where the answers rest.
He knows, and he knows naught, and in so doing he believes he is the wisest of wise.
He layers himself in the latherings of riches, sought in the grounds of others’ burdens.
He is neither miser of gold nor pauper of the trenches; instead he is both. Combined, as the one collecting and discarding. Scooping up in ‘veracious’ heaps that which serves his truth, and throwing out that which does not.
He cannot see his weary ways, and instead labels the rest unjust and wrong, except the select few that follow his way. His light shone bright in the ability to feasibly proclaim his truth as collective truth.
He is not satisfied unless others see him, others hear him, others lift him and validate his existence.
His way is made the only way. And the others, though innocent they be, gather around him as sucklings to his tainted nectar.
He nourishes them with lies—his own.
He lures them in with a sense of belonging. And then, too, they become as him: stagnant in their youth, nurturing nothing and no one, and taking as they please.
They satisfy self to please self. They play with self to please self. They collect and establish more truths.
Until the beggar returns—uncloaked—he is made burdened with entrapment; invisible, trumpeting his drum. Pounding out the horned owl’s screech. Demolishing what is, in hopes of fissuring all that is the entrapment of mankind.
Formidable-forbidding. A lingering, unsurpassed longing, to surrender his making for the unmasking of the man beneath the cloaked resilience.
Bending. Bending towards humanity.
Upside down and twisted. Sideways. Backwards.
Hello. Hello, out there. I wave.
Casual-like, faking the discrepancies lining the walls of my interior.
Wallpaper: aged, peeling, unwanted.
Caution to the wind, I sail outward, into the blue societal corridors.
Painted bleak by ill doers masked in golden-tainted grimaces.
Castaways, alike, we gather into cylinders of being, turning inside the encapsulated thoughts.
Syringed through penetrating drops of nothing.
I am not what they preach, nor say, nor whisper in the cornered room gone viral.
Tentacles forward, burrowing through the broken skin, tantalizing the soul with promises.
Undone, again, in the region born from goodness, now made bitter-sweet in its giving.
How I long to climb the mountain high and scream out the bounty brought onto us—the widow’s heart eternally mourning for the lost child named innocence.
How, if given opportunity, I’d purge the demons from them all, and dance upon the grave called fear.
How I’d rip then, apart the hearts donned black.
Forging, grasping, into the misery found there.
Stand then, we would, upon the cornerstone of our calling, without the stage bearing down beneath us.
And speak no more of these times.
When darkness held the strings to emptied puppets turned asleep.
These are the tracings
Of where I’ve been
Lining my body
Across my skin
The time where I fell
And bruised my knee
A heart scar remains
In memory
Shaped like a Valentine
Oddly it bends
As I round
The crooked corners
Of life again
Belly of a Star 