The Canvas, and The Nails In The Casket

A spoken word piece about religion, judgement, and condemnation based upon experience.

Judgement.
Three vowels,
Six consonants,
The first nail in the closed casket of someone
who hasn't even stopped breathing yet.
It's the eternal label of the clean meth head,
The screaming whispers of once closeted skeletons that have already been laid to rest,
Reputations that precede themselves before the bearer 

even knows them to exist.
Labels lie. 

Back in the day
my cousin Vanessa would bus tables at a small diner
just down the street. 
She was 17, and she had this smile like white piano keys.
She laughed like a harmonica playing the tune of a hopeful song.

She didn't have much apart from her education and her job,
but I remember going in, and trying to make my attitude match her heart's pitch
out of the hope that I would radiate better things. 

I always knew that she would go on to do something great.
Anything.

But when I was sixteen, I learned that she never went to college. 
She never got a scholarship, or any kind of award for math or English.
She didn't graduate top of her class the way I'd assumed that she did, 

or even the way that anyone had expected. 
Actually, I heard that she was homeless.
Now, I don't mean that she doesn't have a home, 
I mean that she no longer has anyone left to share it with. 
See, she went on to become a sort of scientist, or chef, or magician
or however you're comfortable saying that she started
making drugs in her basement. 

When I heard the story the first time, 
they told me she lost things in the following order:
1. Job.
2. Family.
3. Friends. 
4. Teeth. 

When I heard the story the second time, it was more of the same thing.
The third time was identical to the second, and the fourth to the first,
but each time, no one could tell me how she was DOING.
They could only tell me what she had DONE.

Everyone told me it was just unfortunate circumstances,

as if there was nothing that they could do.
BUT NO ONE TRIED TO DO ANYTHING. 
They did everything but disown her. 
As a Christian, I'm supposed to come from a culture
that's about the love and encouragement that she didn't get.
No, she faced the opposite. 
She was treated with intense condemnation was viewed as justification
for the addiction that she couldn't overthrow.
She was basically abandoned. 

A few months ago, I saw her.
She stopped by the house, and I get hear her story from herself. 
A few months ago, she turned her basement into a bomb.
Blew up half of her block, and lived. 
The skeletons came crawling from her closet trying to survive
the chemical fire. 
When she spoke, she would weeze, and when she laughed, 
the accordion that always played in her throat was busted.
She cracked jokes about having as many hairs as teeth,
and she's since stopped caring about how she looks.
Every morning, I shower, and make sure that my hair looks nice
and is going in the right direction so that you will think that my life
is doing the same, well she's since stopped caring, 
but the cool thing is that she has found peace. 

Everyone sees her, and sees nightmare walking down the street even though she's clean,
but what does that say about me? What does that say about them
for parading skeletons that she has finally laid to rest
like puppets on strings 
hanging on rumored conversations meant to dig up the graves
that she buried her closet in?
What does that say about the ones who saw the red dot
and assumed the entire painting was just one color?

The sad thing is that if Vanessa had been a celebrity
who was found passed out in a Cocaine cloak in the backseat of a taxi,
people would have been crying, "Tragedy,"
But if you were a small town kid who gets the title of "addict," 
they close the casket lid before you're even done breathing,
regardless of whether or not you were brave enough to find recovery. 

So many in the body are so focused on killing the wounded
that we forget the pierced hands of the savior who raised the dead.
We are so focused on being "Good Christians" that we forget to be good people.
We are so focused on looking at things black and white
that we confuse the red dot for the entire painting
when in reality, it's the blood coating the graffiti on the sinner
washing them white.
We are focused on what we think we know 
that we become so quick to judge that which we truly don't understand,
and hammer the lid shut on a life 
that we never really gave a chance. 

Author's Note

I've been meaning to write this piece a long time ago, but it's only just now finding its way to the surface of my heart. I'll clean it up more before I perform it, but I thought I would share it in its most honest and vulnerable state. Tell me what you think.