An Interesting Burden & Modern Day Atlas

by Nayeli Pallais

An Interesting Burden

I simply could not be fixed

Despite all my efforts to hold myself together.

I learned quickly in this life that

Cursed be the optimist,

Burdened be the empath,

And doomed who are neither

For feeling everything is far better than feeling

Absolutely nothing.

Maybe this is all there is for me

All I may ever amount to be,

Time built of long moments of sorrow and

Even more swift periods of joy that can never quite

be contained by words no matter how elegantly written

Or loudly spoken.

Just another spectacle for the world to shred with its bare teeth,

Not a drop of blood on their gloved hands

They tell me this mess is my own

My fingers strain as I hold all that I am together

But I slip through my own grasp back into their view.

Doomed by my own gravity,

It is there that my soul wavers with the weight of

the heavens and hell.