De-face

You stand on the stage of the universe

Struggling to take a bow

Tripping on your grown-up ballgown

Wonder what people think now.

You think you're inadequate?

Even when the crowd shouts “no”

When you feel trials coming you get

terrified to face the blow

But Divine breathe is flowing through you,

behind and before and beyond,

and to the people all around you

Giving you a brand new dawn

Stop worrying that smart isn't genius,

that a C is worse that A

Feeling, pretty but not quite gorgeous

Wishing yesterday was today.

Sweat slides down your eyes and blinds you

In a fog of self-esteem

Try to trap everyone behind you

As you strain for the halo's gleam.

Even after all your feats,

All you can hear is your flaws

Ringing through the broken wires

Why can't you hear your applause?

People look like they're glowing

But they're all draped in disguise

If all you want to see is normal

You'll never want to open your eyes.

We're all trying to pass off the blame

But craziness pulls at our heels

Like Achilles in stilettos

We know just how weakness feels.

Reality check

Perfection's no reality

Though the media battles this truth so gallantly

We are all fragments of twisted humanity

Defined in our essence by total insanity.

Fumbling around on this spinning planet we

keep staring in the mirror and just can't let it be

the way we were made with a scribble and a shade

Now cease this charade 'cause that's not how lives are weighed

The warmth of curled lips or the depth behind the iris,

the spread of goodwill like an insidious virus

The willingness to stand on the high-dive of fate

and peel off your mask despite pride and hate.

That's the breath flowing through you

Exhaling what we wish to taste

But we don't want to dive into true

as we painfully de-face.

Like all the sudden your clothes are saran-wrap

Your skin is as clear as the sky

All the demons you hid inside you

Can be found by the scorching eye.

The spotlight will show no mercy

And the world may continue to scowl

But you have to get out of the nursery

And release that scraping howl

Let it radiate on your face when

you take off your mask

When you rise up from the basement

into the sun. Just bask

in the knowledge that you are accepted

And don't have to keep taking aim

You are a celestial wonder

you don't have to be ashamed

Feet

What happens when the voices that you trusted most mess up,

Lead you into the wild but are too afraid to 'fess up?

What happens when you realize that your model of truth

has been lying to you?

Now what am I supposed to do about the words I learned to use?

Your eyes would illuminate in all the dark places

but now they absorb light from our fiery faces.

Your footsteps were long and deep as I hopped to the next

Till my gaze rose to meet this vast nothingness

My world tips and spins as the cheshire cat grins

Now the winner loses, but nobody wins.

Where are my own feet? Are they lost forever?

Sinking into these footprints of never?

What was left is right and what was right is wrong

And now they're making horror movies out of sing-a-longs.

I keep on sliding up and leaping straight down

mumbling and tumbling into the ceiling-ground.

A life that used to be like the rows of a choir

has been slapped into a drunken circus on fire.

My heart hammers harder and my legs swivel faster

hoping to find a ticket out of this disaster.

In the midst of the smoke and the sick-cycle drone,

my feet—yes my own—slam into something stone.

I drink in the smell of a rock never changing

and take root on paths that won't need rearranging.

The direction of this bedrock is still up for grabs

But it is unshaking beneath my tired scabs.