My Mind is a Hammer.
My Mind is a Hammer.
Behold this, my Hammer.
My Hammer is slow to swing.
It is easy, my Hammer, to dodge.
It is sometimes weighty, my Hammer,
with the dregs of all my experiences
of life.
It is this weight which makes it slow.
It is often heavy, my hammer, needing
the full force of my will to swing.
It is not a rapier, like some minds
full of swift and sharp flourishes,
stinging like death from a thousand
hornet's nests.
Nor is it sharp, my Hammer, and edged,
and calculating, turning and twisting,
thrusting or parrying; it is not as noble
or as beautiful as a sword-mind is.
It is not a gun, my Hammer, firing quickly
jittery, loaded with seven bullets, eight,
quick as death, firing every which way at once,
direct and swift and penetrating.
It is not a lance, my Hammer, carried by nobler
people on nobler steeds; people who have the
world to carry them, the thundering hooves of
a great multitude to drive home the points they
choose to make.
It is not an axe, my Hammer, Divisive, gleaming
with grooves and rivulets, brandished high in the
sun of This and That, of Left and Right and Wrong.
I am not sharp enough, often, to see those divides.
No, my mind is a Hammer. It is heavy with the weight
of a lifetime abused, insulted and degraded, with
the loss of love, with the opening, painful and gradual,
of my eyes to my ignorance and privilege;
It is scored with a half-dozen mars, my Hammer, for I use it,
and when I use it, it bashes against concepts unknown and
unfamiliar to me. It is not sturdy, my Hammer, nor is it the
mightiest of things. Slow, patient, ponderous, a swing in a wide arc,
to build things up
to tear things down. Because a hammer is not a weapon
only, to inflict a wound and win. A hammer can build, can bind,
can push together. A hammer can smash, can open wide. A Hammer,
my Hammer, is slow, sometimes, in its momentum; awkward too in
its use. It is not flittering and fancy, slight and hidden. No,
My Mind is a Hammer, and it is mine.
I would not trade it, slow as it is, heavy as it is, for anything.
Because I can lift it, My Hammer. I can lift it a thousand times,
because a hammer is humble, simple, plain. It is not forged, a Hammer,
it is not slender or to be broken and cast aside. It is Diligent, a Hammer,
My Hammer, working and toiling and building and breaking and opening
and closing doors, collapsing walls and building them. My Hammer can endure
a thousand swings, a thousand thousand swings.
And so can I.
I would not give it up for the world.