Built From It

From the gravel in the gut of a broke-down trailer row,

to the sharp, cold syntax and the scholarship they swore I’d never know—

I had places to go.

I had to spit with a flow so heavy it dragged the doubters down like they were caught in the silt of an undertow.

They didn’t know what to do with a kid overlooked,

a boy rattled by the lightning held in the spine of a book;

they should’ve seen my mean write hook

swinging out from the shadows where no one else cared to looked.

Seventeen with teenage dreams and nowhere safe to land,

life went feral by demand,

driver seat playing the mattress while I slept with a closed hand.

I learned to dodge a mother’s chaos—that serrated kind of love

that leaves a lasting bruise, a jagged push and a shove.

And the church-house hands, raised from wooden pews,

tried to hammer my spirit into the shape of their own distorted views.

But the shoes didn't fit.

My God was always too big for the small minds they lived in;

my sin was just a trench of desperate prayer and despair,

breathless in the dark, asking,

“God, are you even there?”

They tried to square my spirit with a fault-line faith,

but I’m a different kind of builder—

I make beams out of the break.

I forged from grace—from the weight of what never quite sank in,

bolting a backbone of iron and tempering my own skin.

I don’t just weather the storm;

I read the pressure as it begins to form.

I hear the roof-beams moan before the structure ever deforms.

So when I walk into a room, I don’t beg for a space—

I am the level and the measure;

I am the standard I choose to make.

I am ink in veins, the blood on the page.

The one with his back to the wall, still kicking at the cage.

I have the weight of worlds on my shoulders, but the frame won’t bend.

Scholar. Fighter. Father. Writer.

The means and the end.

I don’t live for the applause;

I don't kneel to the crowd’s whim.

I just sharpen the tools from the scraps I’ve gathered in.

They make mountains out of molehills while I’m standing on the summit.

They say I changed?

I didn’t.

They must carry the guilt of it.

But I’m grateful for the indifference and the hate of the past and the present—

I’m built from it.