It does not make you strong
but it may change you
as fires and pressures of the deep Earth
transform quiet layers of laid down sediment
into rock with different qualities.
It does not make you brave
but it may change your fears
so that wolf-men howling on moonlit cliffs
pale beside the endless prospect
of a broken escalator.
It does not make you wise
but it may change the things you know,
about yourself, and your potentials,
about the world you move in,
the people you know.
It does not make you patient,
but it may challenge your endurance,
“long-suffering” means “suffering for a long time”
that doesn’t give you tools for coping
sometimes you snarl and snap.
It does not make you a different person,
in fact, we should lose the distance,
there is no manageable abstraction
there’s no “you” that this happens to,
face it: it’s me who is hurting.
19th September 2011
