Birth is the forge that has wrought the steel that made me what I am,
Death is the hammer, which has tempered the blade that is my body,
Circumstance is the whetstone that hones the blade to a keen and cruel edge,
Together they are the bellows which fans the embers that boils my blood,

Life, death, and circumstance has crafted a blade both light and dark,
Able to sever the fetters that ever binds me to my meager existence,
I am enlisted in a self-imposed struggle against a formidable foe, one that I know I cannot win,
Armed only with the knowledge and my enmity against the stifling presence of that which made me.

I wage war against my life and sustain many deep and perilous wounds,
These wounds they never heal, they torture me with a profound hurt,
Unseen the life flows out from me, but I continue my internal plight,
I did not choose my path but only I can walk it, locked within the shadow of life...

...a life that consumes my vitality with only the embrace of death to look forward to,
I am not a being of my own creation and yet I strive to make the creation my own,
I struggle against the brutal forces that was the cause of my conception and birth,
It is a life I run from and ever to, a thing deceptively known to me as my own.

A life that is preyed upon, no longer a life of love and security, has it ever been?,
I look forward to the peaceful sleep of death, but I fear it will not come to me peacefully,
With each passing day I lament from the weight of my life and eventual death,
For this is the reason I struggle, for my dreams and my own existence, these are the elements that has spawned the thing that I am; human.

By: Joseph A. Webster
July 27, 2007