Day 9
December 3 – Day 9 of the 16 Days
MASTERMIND
By Darlene Elias
Pop, pop, give it up, hocus, pocus, don’t lose focus, you got this even when you think you don’t.
Pain is on the menu yet again, escalating to when he says when. Who invented this world of mine?
People may tell you what to think and what to feel, to give more and more. It is always something, and never stops.
Fight, fight, it isn’t right. Love supreme can be really mean even when you don’t want anything. It is all surreal.
Right down to your very core, you know it is time to walk out the door. You stay hoping for a little more.
Pop, pop, you don’t get what you expected. Cry and cry, swallowing your tears, feeling it in your heart and soul.
You got this, it is no one else’s reality but yours, the air you breathe, the days you consume, to the tune of twenty four.
When you don’t see the horizon or the light, time is constant.
Tomorrow is another day, I will go all the way and cross the finish line.
I say when all the time, the flowers are fragrant in my head and keep me alive.
Darlene Elias has been selected as the 2025 Emerging Writer Fellow by the Straw Dog Writers Guild. She is an emerging writer and poet from Western Massachusetts. Darlene is a Hawaiian Boricua Anti Colonial Feminist who uses literature, poetry, and spoken word to elevate and validate her own experience as a woman in the United States.
The illustration for this piece is by Dale Schwarz – www.tocreate.org/original-art-work