Releasing the Poison

He called me a martyr,
on before either of us could really have known
not only what it meant to be
but how right he might come be.

I love no perspective less than my own
and clung to the hope of imagining the best as yours
giving you every credit, clearly, now, more than you could hope to earn,
wanting without reason to see things salvageable
and thus assigning you the best of intentions,
but cried as though my heart might be irreparably broken
with the pain of fear that I was wrong,
with the pain you gave me because you could no longer bear your own.

Now I sit under a cloud of clarity
that it is not my place to assign your intentions,
nor to assume their origins,
and that I was indeed wrong in that,
though can it ever be wrong to hope, and to hope the best,
it does so often lead to disappointment such as this.

If it should be real that I am so much stronger,
I can take solace in that thought of comfort.
I have born up full under torment and pain in many years' worth of ways,
full still of wonder and hope and love and longing,
have learned with each trial strength,
what strength it takes to bend but not break,
and if your pain has brown beyond the strength you have to bear it
such that you feel you must drain it into me to get on,
it won't break me.

In time, I know, the poison will drain, must drain, from my soul, or else kill me, as is its nature. Thus it is not that which I fear, not a soul blackened with the rot of this poison, nor a life ended by it.

Yet I feel no compulsion to fight the poison, only this bland detachment as I watch it reap its due. As true as I know it will claim my soul, my life, if allowed to remain, so I know it is not for me this poison came. It has sought its victim, and well, entwined it in vines of death.

There is no want of passion to stir this antipathy, as in fact it is that which must be embraced, and accepted. With the quiet and calm of determination I must remove this victim of the poison. I must remain detached and view not the loss of this victim from myself, nor assign it undue importance.

My solace will be found in the knowledge that its pain may linger only temporarily, as the phantom pain of a severed limb oft does, then pass, and with the passing of pain, all threat of further harm.