What I Am

A Poem by Dunamis Pneuma

If I tell you who I am, then I will have no choice but to tell you; I am a man. With all pretenses and malcontents, I stand as a man. Rot with dreams and blessed with insecurities; I am a man. What is left and what is right, stand idle in the meaning of man. What a man I am who found that even rain cannot wash away this shame. Given a voice and reason still, I find it hard to tell you what it means to be a man. Yet still, a man I am, tempered steel in wholly fractured fashion. Coarse to the touch with fragile eyes that veil the soul. To be seen as more, is all this man desires, yet hidden I remain. A display of fraudulent virtue and a monument to fallacy. Held high in the grandest form of contempt and justified by the most prodigious of delusions. This man I am, hiding behind the truth of deceit and fearful of the facts of living. Who is to say that this man I am isn’t a delusion of grandeur or a prize of fools. As a man, I stand and as a man, I bury the truth of what I am. Who knows what hides behind this man, nothing more than a shadow of doubt. Still, what choice do I have but to be a man, when youth flees from this man, and time mercilessly pushes life to an end. So then the question is asked and the answer is given. If I tell who I am, then I will have no choice but to tell you what I am.