You Need It

Buried once beneath pressing voices, it is boiling up like a rising jealousy. This is 
placement. The ascendant. Beating, 
beating, beating. A steady flow of analytical pauses burning up through every extremity you 
never knew how to use. 
This is placement. The ascendant. Beating, beating, beating. Every stinging conviction 
such a foollish man never knew 
was holed up inside him errupts. It is volatile and it is painful and it is promising. And it 
comes into you and it comes out 
of you and it’s beating, it’s beating, it’s beating. You can’t ever ignore it. No, a foolish man 
could not deny its presence. 
Couldn’t withold its beating. You pace to wear it out and it lives in your footsteps. You blink 
to make it stop and every 
eyelash leaves a trail like you tried to shake your head at the stars at midnight. Yes, you 
can clench your fists so tight 
your nails dig into your palms and you bleed and the sweat pours salt into your wounds 
and there it is. There it is, 
terrible,consuming and inconvenient only because you forget who it is. You forget where it 
comes from and why it is 
there. You forget why it is within you because you are foolish. It is there because of you but 
you are not at fault for it. For 
fault is for the weak and it should not make you stumble and it should not make you stutter 
when you speak of it. When 
you speak of its beating, beating, beating. It is not a drum and you should not, you cannot 
march to it. It is not the blood 
in your veins or the heart that injects and protects and projects though that is where it lives 
and no foolish man, no man 
at all could drain himself dry of it. It will occupy the space on the floor where you try to leave 
it and it will grow because 
you will feed it and it will drown you because it knows you need it. 
.
Copyright © | Year Posted 2008

Poem

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Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace