Poem #1

“My body is a temple”

How many times have I heard this term?

I guess I thought I knew

But I still have to learn

I don’t like my feet

Or my thighs

But my eyes

My eyes are beautiful

Deep brown

Glimmering innocence

Laced with fear

And they peer down at my arms

Saying, “no, no you’re fat”After all, society says imperfect girls look like that

But how can eyes with such meaning and depth

Be a window to thoughts as demeaning as that?How can the window to my soul be the same window widening the hole?Full of dissatisfaction, disgust and despair

That’s not right, that’s not fair

If my soul and my dreams can be seen through my eyes

How can the same gaze draw shame from something as abstract as thighs?

The conflict rides high and the thoughts drag low

Yet somehow, in the back of my mind, I know

I know I can be beautiful

And that happiness is contagious

But on a daily, my brain screams it’s outrageous

Seeing my arms, my thighs, my chin, my stomach

Yet I just want to scream and stop caring so much

My body is my shell, my armor, my facilitant

While my mind and my heart are the gears and equipment

Whether I weigh the quote norm

Or stand averagely tall

My thoughts and beliefs are what matters overall

My friends and my family don’t care how I look

Yet the number of times I’ve cared could fill a number of books

Books that should be burned

With all the thoughts and distortion

All the times I’ve blown my body out of proportion

When I think about beauty, I don’t think about people

I think about nature and feelings and creations

Art and stories and quality time together

Someone once said to me, “I am not a human having a spiritual experience, I’m a soul having a human experience”And in that moment, my body fell away

As did attachment of guilt and all shame

It was like being reborn

Filled with innocence and purity

And now I just strive to live in that as infinity