This Gray, Unfortunate Place (2)

15 - (Political Defenses Against Rebuttals of Correctness)

Since the sun first shined 

down on me and my eyes,

I've noticed that I 

am a tad defiant. 

Individuality 

is one of my greatest kinks,

and I wanna see things,

soaring through the sea. 

However, this also means 

that one of my closest friends

has been the mechanism of defensiveness,

and when anything becomes an idea 

I'll not stop at doing my best

to wrestle it. 

When a person tells me that 

a word, phrase, or sentence 

is 'incorrect', I feel that they have now sentenced

themselves as being a glib figure of authority

of whom I shall now wage war with, warring 

over the abstraction. 

However, what I really just need to hear

is how much it hurts them,

and in the end 

I'll die a fool --

a poor, broken, bitter fool --

because in those moments,

I wasn't heroic, I was cruel. 

The idea seemed fiendish,

but it was I who kept trampling 

over the god-given boundaries 

of a close friend 

and kept saying,

time and time again,

a word that rubbed him the wrong way. 

It always seemed like 

something happening to me,

a call of attack 

to end the charades

where I got a laugh. 

So when she said, 'please, don't say that',

I forgot that it was a person, like me,

with undefeatable convictions and feelings. 

It felt like power-play,

and so long as it was an idea --

not a human feeling --

then, I stood to be an idiot 

with defensiveness 

as my only friend

in the end.