Where I Stand

Here I stand,
Until the time
Was it a crime to see
what cannot be touched
Hear voices speak words that can't be undone
Was it my fault I was invincible
To the naked eye, I am invisible
I cannot be seen
Because no one wants to see me
I am different
Different from the rest of them
So they ignore me
But I don't ignore them
No one is friendly
Why were they so blind
Because I am not them
I am only mine
I am different
But I can see
But they can't see me
I watch them fall
Divided they fall
Together they die
But here I stand
Until the end of time
Was it a crime that
I was unique
Original to the human mind
I was invisible to there standards
Invisible to their lies
But as they kneel to beg
I watch them beg
But here I stand until the end of time
Was it a crime for me to live my life
A crime for wanting to survive
No one would answer
So I will wait until the end of time

---domayn C. Thompson

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

------ maya Angelou