You Were Never Born to Die in Mint Condition

Sculpture: Expansion by Paige Bradley

Ambrosia C.

You were never born to die in mint condition.

You were born to explore and ravage every nook and cranny

Of both the world and yourself.

You were born to break your bones, your heart and yourself

In desperate attempts to find your reason for being.

You were born to bruise and scar yourself,

Walk till your knees gave away

On your journey to find the golden city of El Dorado and the silver lining of your life;

Swim until your skin wrinkled and your eyes burnt

On your quest to find the lost city of Atlantis

And the belief you lost in love and dreams and pixie dust;

Scratch and tear yourself while you dug a hole

To both the centre of the world and your heart;

Sail and swim the seven seas

To find Stevenson’s treasure island and Verne’s mysterious island

And hope to lose the fear of drowning you held inside.

You were born to travel the world time and time again

Till you believed you could travel it in eighty days with a blindfold on;

You were born to lose Milton’s paradise

And on your journey through inferno and purgatory

Hope to regain it under Dante’s starless skies

As you hoped to regain the love you lost under Gogh’s starry ones.

You were born to crack skulls and chip nails

And burn yourself with fire and light as you travelled alongside angels and demons

And learned to coexist with both.

You were born to tread Whitman’s leaves of grass and race through paper towns

As you hoped again to find all that may yet be real in this world.

You were born to find the chinks in your stardust armour

As you flew past nebulae and quasars with Pery’s little prince,

On your odyssey through the history of time

To uncover all the timeless truths no one bothers to look for anymore.

You were born to strain your vocal chords

As you learned to sing with the voices of the mountains,

And splash yourself with colours

As you painted pictures in the sky with all the colours of the wind,

Pictures for death to marvel at as he went about his daily routine of collecting souls

And you went about yours to collect memories.

You were born to write till you understood why a raven was like a writing desk

And read till your mind was blown to bits

As you sat inside the burning Alexandrian library

And hoped for more poems that seemed to detonate your soul;

You were never born to work a nine to five,

The maps in your head and the compass in your heart

Would never allow your restless soul to settle down

And wear yourself away behind an empty box with a screen.

You were born to turn to dust only after you had conquered the world,

And only after you found out that you can never quite conquer the soul.

My love, you were never born to die in mint condition.