By: Natalie May G. Sioco
Lives are too jagged,
too unevenly wrought,
to be but an average.
Yet your tongue,
Wielded a cruel fluency;
Mother tongue,
to the sterile vocabulary of appraisal.
Mid.
A six out of ten.
A grade.
A weight.
A verdict affixed to you,
as though existence
could be ledgered in mere ink.
Too many seasons
have slipped your grasp,
Mistaking arithmetic
for purpose.
Muting the wild cadence of your soul,
into stark margins.
Until the very marrow of your being
is crushed into a thin,
numeric dust.
But numbers
are poor analyzers.
They tell,
how many.
Never
how.
How
you forced your eyes ajar
on midnights,
learning,
memorizing,
what others merely know.
How
your gaze doted,
on the opposite side of the board–
stuck,
as pairs of eyes
followed the blood of quill
written onto the other.
How
your heart beat louder
than your answer
trembling in your throat,
as steady agreement
gathered around a single thought.
How
you tucked the paper closer,
while whispers of scores
drifted through the room,
your own remaining warm
within your palm–
folded in no forfeit,
yet kept for a time
it may rest amongst theirs.
Two journeys never share a terrain;
How, then, does one arrive
at an average.
Souls are too
multidimensional
to be compressed.
Yet still,
years you have spent
In weighing yourself
By your absences.
tell me—
if average were truly ordinary,
why does it demand
your extraordinary resistance?
The sky owes to no apology
for its vast azure.
The wandering wind
never feared
a shifting path.
Average is but a number,
then why
has your heart
worked tirelessly
to outpace it?
Perhaps there was nothing
Mundane about your malice,
in waging war
against becoming average.
Your rebellion;
outrunning the metric,
Is proof enough.
