The Fool

My imagination is the most human part of me.

It refuses to stay quiet.

It keeps building things out of nothing, 

palaces out of dust,

It keeps me alive,

keeps me reaching for more

than what my hands can hold.

It paints love in colors I’ve never touched,

shows me tenderness I haven’t yet lived,

gives me versions of myself

that are stronger, braver, kinder.

Sometimes I think I am most alive

in the places my mind wanders.

It gives me more than the world itself does.

It hands me a thousand versions of love,

a thousand different skies,

a thousand ways to be free.

In my mind I can go anywhere,

I can be anyone.

I can live a hundred lives before the sun even rises.

But it makes me foolish too.

Because I believe too easily in the worlds I build.

I believe the voices I invent,

the warmth of people who don’t exist,

the promises that echo in my chest

though no one ever spoke them.

I believe in things that can’t stay

once the morning comes.

It tricks me into thinking

I belong in those dreams,

when in truth,

I’m only a visitor.

A ghost walking through halls of gold,

knowing the walls will disappear

the second I reach out to lean on them.

It gives me the taste of joy

and then takes the cup away.

It teaches me to long for more,

but never shows me how to keep it.

it offers me everything.

The whole world,

and a thousand more.

It lets me live as someone

who never runs out of love,

someone who is always understood,

someone who can finally breathe without fear.

And then it exiles me.

Leaves me standing on the edge

of my own mind,

looking back at what I can’t hold onto.

It feels cruel,

to give me everything

and remind me it was never mine.

My imagination makes me human,

and it makes me a fool.

It gives me everything,

hope, beauty, wonder, love,

and then exiles me from it all,

like a guest who was never meant

to stay.

-dmnd