She Follows the Birds to Freedom

In Hopes that Words Will Break the Cage

Sometimes I stay up all night
and just whisper words into the air.
My words and others;
because they say words have power.
So I am waiting for them
to break the cage.
These bars are blocking out the sun.
Sometimes if I listen really hard
and look very close
I can see them floating up into the darkness, disappearing like wisps of magical fairy dust. Or ashes.
The embers that will burn this cage to the ground so that from the ashes
I can rise to heights that I can
only dream of knowing.
Dreams.
That's all I've ever had in this cage,
all I've ever done,
so afraid of living, that my fantasy has
been exchanged for my breathing
and I am lost in the tendrils
of going and leaving.
One world after another,
I weave them in and out of each other
until I don't know which world I like best. Fantasy and reality put to the ultimate test
of familiarity and sometimes restless contempt for the rules of gravity.
They are like magnets opposed,
pushing each other away as I try to force them to stay together.
Sometimes I spend the whole night writing,
the four corners of the pages
are the bars which keep me captive,
my words are good enough for paper
but not for the air,
my words don't fly they only stare
back at me as I write them,
immobile and paralyzed.
Either they don't realize their potential for greatness or they just don't care anymore. Sometimes captivity will do that to you,
for if you are treated like a slave for long enough,
if you are given so much to bear
and no hope to run with,
then a slave is exactly what you will become. Never mind the fact
that you came from royalty,
that you were born with freedom in your lungs and the pureness of youth in your knees.
Knees that knew how to outrun the sun
and eyes that could outshine the moon and all its host of stars.
Captivity will wrap around you
and strangle the memories right out
until all you remember is
shackles and darkness.
So I stay up all night and whisper.
Maybe somewhere the sound will carry
and it will echo.
I stay up all night and write,
maybe the words will sink so deep
they will find a new world
where pages don't feel like prisons cells
and walls don't feel like cages.
I stay up at night and rattle my cage,
in hopes that one day
the cage will break,
practicing for the day when
I will rattle the stars instead.

SK