Let it spill out in torrents of lime and orange paint from the cracks around every part of your soul and heart.

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Let your voice deafen jets and the DC10’s sky-cracking din, with truths that carry to heavens and galaxies beyond you.

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Let your words blast out, breaking stones into rubble, the phrases that dragged you down.  Sharp and direct, so the whistle of their speed can be heard long after they are released.

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Let yourself feel each scar before you catapult the pain from an ancient trebuchet, that sends it so far, time moves differently there.

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Let your mind soften and rest in the spangled snugness of a jelly-cushion in a perfectly silenced room where you can clearly hear your own self.

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Let your soul leach bile and vitriol into a dashing white river where it will mix with mud and debris and be dashed on boulders some way downstream.

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Let words you heard be spliced by a thousand Qatari swords and watch as the paper confetti spoils in the rain so it no longer exists.

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Let your story resound and fill libraries, cinemas and theatres so actors say in unison “This is not mine – this is yours!” and authors say clearly “I heard you!”

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Don’t let it be silenced and stilled by the echoes of voices that still wake you in nights that they no longer own.

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Don’t fall quiet when your story meanders through a summer woodland and a dark journey home and the words run ahead of you, out of sight for a short time.

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Don’t put your words away in your safe, or your hope chest, or under your bed as fear still keeps you from placing them on your wall, in pride of place, with the title “Your Life, Your Story”.

 

Meg Cooke