Hand-me-down

 

It's hard to find your identity

when you are always

linked to another.

They expect a mimic, a clone.

 

Someone to take the throne.

 

To my dad's workmates

I was always young "Bill,"

or my older sibling's

younger brother...

 

Never Kyle. Never me.

Always someone

I wasn't destined to be.

 

School days spent in shadow walks,

creeping footsteps landed with a thud.

Photos over walls, my brother's glories,

football captain, plastered in the hallway.

 

And I tried.

 

I tried to fit. Because society told me

that to make it I would have to become

somebody else.

 

I played football, became a core member

of the team. I worked twice as hard to try to

create my own name, but always in those

same footsteps I remained. And always

I dreamed of wide open skies 

and vast sandy beaches.

 

I fell into the same after-school job.

The same bands playing on the same stereo.

Same hand me down brands on my clothes.

 

But our minds were different,

mine glided whilst his stood

rooted to the ground.

 

And I love him. He is my brother,

and we share a lot,

but I was never the same, not a bit.

 

And I worked in a factory

where my dad worked till he'd drop.

Always in shadows, never a man of my own.

Never a story, just some borrowed lines

and some hand-me-down pages to follow.

 

And it's hard to find your identity

when you are different 

but trying to fit the mould.

 

So when my walls collapsed,

I started to stand on my own.

I started to see who I was,

who I'd been all along.

I found my words,

not some hand-me-down song,

and now I live as I live.

A day at a time,

because life is so beautiful

and I want to make every memory mine.

Doodle Waterfalls

 

My handwriting has always been messy.

Well, I say always – sometimes it was just

minuscule. Barely writing at all.

Like me, it hid, just hugging the lines

of my page, hardly raising.

Just a slight jump, a flickering kick

of a dance, before it would

dive back to safety. Hugging the line.

 

That was until I got told

it was a little too small.

Now overwrought, I overthought.

I put all of my attention

into making the

letters pop. I'd curve them

high up, then let

them

 

drop.

 

But they just resembled

scribbles, or inkblots, or periodically

characters from some alien space plot.

No amount of work

would make them sit still

like all of the other kids' words did.

 

Mine were wild, untamed.

They didn't so much write

as exclaim. They leapt like flame,

angry scratched veins of word slurry.

 

But no matter what I did,

I could never make them...

 

Neat.

 

And this troubled me, because

the words could be perfect

but the letters,

they made my words

look like me. Out of place.

Different. A freak.

 

So I always dreaded handing in my words.

 

But on the flip side, my folders

were doodle works of art,

coated in hours of

landmarks - a memory here,

a song lyric there,

a landscape of all my layers.

Faces, beasts,

hearts scrawled with names

that wouldn't know I was alive at all.

 

Hidden secrets...

 

Not so hidden when you had to

hand them to teacher.

 

And the margins were

stretched out, sketchy waterfalls

of doodles and thought.

A draft work

of fluid art.

Monuments to what

I didn't know back then...

 

Who I was...

 

A child with ADHD.

 

I needed to constantly be moving.

Always letting my pen flow

where it needed, bleeding all

of my thoughts in ink to the sky,

and I seeded

those pages with so many

mini-masterpieces,

they could have held

an exhibition in my name.

 

But alas, I just got told to stop.

 

Not "use a blank piece of paper,"

not "is there something troubling you."

 

Just stop.

 

If you put as much effort

into your work as you

do daydreaming...

 

Never allowing the true child to bloom,

instead growing a weed in a darkened room.

 

But here's the thing. I passed all of the exams,

higher grades than all in my school, because

the doodles were a learning tool.

Relaxing me into listening.

 

Now when I write it flows out like music,

still not pretty, most definitely

not neat, but it moves

in rhythm to my internal beat.

Smile like you mean it

 

And I'd

smile like

I mean it,

miles wide,

like the wings

of a mythical eagle

or some symbolic phoenix.

 

But behind my eyes

I was a boat capsized,

trying to tie together

the words spoken.

For I couldn't comprehend,

or understand

the subtle cues,

or the tics

to the voice you used.

I spent years confused

by the whispering trees

in the corridors of learning.

 

And my seat was burning

as I was itching to see meaning

in my yearning.

To understand the waves,

or how the world

kept turning,

 

when everyone looks down on it

and treads all over its surface.

 

I poured myself into books

I was too young

to understand, too unwired

to fully tie the lines

to the images that

flashed in my mind.

But I saw worlds

not unlike mine.

And I walked with

demons and ghouls,

I held love in the

whistling hills, and

I wandered the

word-lined fields,

to serve myself a meal

that would fill my soul...

 

And for a brief escape I felt.

 

Whole.