"I Need Help & Empathy"

I Need Help

I need help.

And I mean I'm sure that there are a lot of people that would agree with that statement (and for a bunch of different reasons) but when I tell you I need help, it's not just some general plea for assistance, it's not a psychological evaluation or a medical prognosis; when I tell you that  I need help, what you are hearing is the honest cry of a dying soul. I can't stay here much longer. I don't think I'll survive. Like a twelve month fetus, I've long outgrown the confines of this tomb. It's come time for me to exit these walls, venture out into the world and put to use all that I've developed. What's the point of lungs that never breathe air?

Somedays I feel like a zombie....a walking dead shadow of a man—a poisonous two-legged leech—forced to sustain itself off the life of others. I fight against this. I remind myself of the things that I've read in books, things like I descend from warriors, Kings, builders and scholars; that my blood holds their memory and, subsequently, their strength. I tell myself this again and again but then I wake up in this concrete and steel tomb, this 6x12 double-decker casket, and wonder is it all delusion? Am I crazy? Would I know if I was?

"I know why the cage bird songs," that's what my Granny Maya told me before she died ... another person lost while I'm doing this bid.

"I know what the cage bird feels," Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote.

Do you, I wondered. You feel sympathy, huh?

I listened as Dunbar spoke of the caged bird's song, that pain-filled prayer resonating from deep within his throbbing breast; as he spoke of that raging resistance rallied against his cage—how he beats his wings against the unyielding bars until they're stained red with the blood of his impotence. Yet and still, I wasn't convinced.

Why didn't he speak of the nostalgia, I thought, that never-ending longing for a world only familiar in fantasies; a world now trapped in muddled memories and repressed joys; those bittersweet moments  jolted awake by the soft violins and heart-strung melodies of some far too familiar rom-com? Why didn't he speak of the giving up—that moment when the jailbird loses all hope of once again soaring high; when it finally accepts that its captors have forever clipped it's wings; that it will live the remainder of its life in a cage, a pet, a curious object for visitors to observe and feed—when he realizes that this is now what Life means?

(Uh cuz he wasn't talking about being a jailbird, Saint. Stop tripping.)

"EMPATHY"

I know what the jailbird feels, alas.

When days are long and time's slow to pass;

When your here is there

and you live nowhere,

Out of Sight Out of Mind, they quote.

Grown numb to stares

of those who don't care,

No more anger left to provoke;

Spirit's broke, yet you try to cope,

Grasping at strings of hope.

Trapped in a pit of self-inflicted whys,

Where muted cries form lullabies

Woefully sung in a foreign tongue

to put to sleep instincts to reach;

You beg God for a rope.

I know what the jailbird feels, indeed,

I feel things myself;

But where the cage bird sings

"Mercy please, I need some help!"

"Death is found in the moment the slave accepts the plantation as his home."
—Anynomous