Magpie tell me all your stories

There were only two ways of being that I was taught as a child

The first: to be good
to be polite, to be the place between the rock of truth and
the hard opinions of those who know better than;
agree and waver and apologize whenever your clay-laden tongue
must state, for fear of calcification, the truth.
Make sure all your queries start with sorry.
Be certain your certainties start with softness.
Then you might be counted among the good.

The second: to be bad.
to be brash and brave and boisterous
and all those other words that began with b that I was not to
be. Unyielding and owning what I knew I knew.
A ruler is twelve inches, and force is mass and
acceleration towards a distant horizon
divided by gravity but never brought down by
'what does a girl even know about--'.

Each nuance, notion, and knot dissolved into dichotomy.

To be good would be easier, in some respects.
At least fewer people would jeer and taunt and
tell you that you are the great disappointment.
The softness of drowning.
To be bad would be easier, on some days.
At least you are not beholden to their limited
Juvenile notions of should and ought and must.
The world's sharpest edges.

The Scylla and Charybdis of experience and life.

Knowing you must navigate a third path
to who they will say that you are
with only the voices of your sisters to guide.
Sisters whose paths were much harder you know--
but we all walk it.
We become the guides even as we seek
We find others as we are finding ourselves.
Not to drown or be dashed against the rocks,
but bite your bloody lips and speak
And thus, to fly.

--

Work in progress. Brewed for several days after conversations pertaining to other things entirely, as it goes. Critique/suggestions/etc. are welcome.