"Lord, free me of myself..."

‎"Lord, free me of myself
so I can please you."
- Michaelangeo

sift me
free from the chaff
of who I
think
I am...

shatter the shell
of
"me,"
the ego that
needs to
have
become
something,
someone...
a name,
a place,
a title, role
an office,
an address...

she is not
what lies within

she is not the one
I feel pulsing with Life
in the middle of
the night
when the darkness
frees me
from her face in the mirror,
the boundaries of
skin and
history,
the patterns written
on strands of
DNA or
just another story of
how she's
always...or never...
been

shake the chrysalis until
the not-so-fragile
self-encasing of
"this is me, and this is not"
gives way to
what I could never have
imagined when
crawling,
inching,
gnawing my way across
a limited landscape of
the
leaves and
dreams
I thought were
all I'd ever know of home and
hunger...

but there is sky
and wind,
and I am surprised to
find that I have wings
still moist with
the tears
of what I thought I'd lost in the
black soup of
remorse and despair,
the night space
where
I became nothing
but
the silence of
a hope
that would not
die,
a thread of
consciousness
that wanted
nothing
but
its
right to
steep in the
presence
of
nothing

except
perhaps
just to love...

not to love
something,
or someone...
but to
love without
reason,
to love without
condition or
deserving,
to love
simply and
without
reciprocity or
recognition...

to love...

sift me,
shake me,
shatter me free,

free
from
me...

the me that needs to
be a character
in her own
love story


"Knock, and He'll open the door.
Vanish, and He'll make you shine like the sun.
Fall, and He'll raise you to the heavens.
Become nothing,
and He'll turn you into everything.”

― Rumi