Song of Myself

I

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

But there’s a part of me, myself,

The part that I unscrewed,

When everything felt so tight,

Too constraining, when people said,

‘Tell us about yourself’, and I saw nothing,

But dark blurry shapes - incoming, 

As they turned the screws on me,

And I knew myself, I couldn’t enter,

Their fiery machine or breathe inside its confines,

I looked down, identified my tightest screw, 

And I unscrewed it myself, held it loosely,

Put it in my pocket and walked home,

Breathing in the trees and feeling the expanse,

Of something bigger, something else,

I realised I’d dropped the screw, 

And tempted to retrace my steps,

I myself decided that I was better off without it,

That screw of mine is not loose, it’s missing,

Rusting in a gutter, likely regretting its greedy turns,

And I myself can move without check and with original energy.