Thief of Words

If you want to know me, here’s the open door. Read this Poetic Memoir.

I am a thief — an unrepentant thief of words. I steal them from everywhere, everyone; no page or memory block is safe from my predatory gaze. No human or machine can hide them from my gathering scythe. Kings, Queens, or fancy machines, I don't care who or what has them. I've been collecting them since I sounded my first word, stolen by mimicry. That's where my life of imagination truly began.

It was slower when I was younger; everything was analog, paper, books collected on a shelf, and paper scribbled with sloppy punctuation. I'm not so young anymore; I'm old. Age robs your body, though it can sharpen the mind. Wisdom comes to the vigilant, the ponderers, the seekers. It is the Wisdom of GOD to conceal a thing, but the honor of Kings to search out a matter. I am the King of my small domain, ruling over my vault of stolen words, searching for wisdom. I've amassed a volume of words. I dip into the vault when I write, and ink flows from the Grace-cracked stone, my mind, dripping ink to the page, forming the words.

With a lifetime of stolen words, I wait for a spark to land that will set them free. I never know where the spark will jump from, so I'm always on duty to fan the nascent flame. When a spark lands, I call for the modern pen and pad, incapable of resisting the urge to scribe. My magnesium pen blazes across the page, scorching a trail of new thoughts. But, while my mind still blazes with words and images, my body now tells a different story, the story of broken dreams and fused metal.

Once upon a time, I was an intrepid explorer trodding the backcountry of places seldom seen, stealing words from the wild places to fuel my burgeoning dreams of the writer. Now, I'm a broken-frame dreamer, living vicariously through memories and the stories of those still blessed to walk the line. My body bears the scars of those wild journeys, no longer flesh alone but fused with metal.

Once, not so long ago, I was fully mortal like most people on this planet, but now, I am part apparatus, a Borg living in this world of flesh. The apparatus is pressed deeply into my bones, with a battery slipped between layers of skin. Like Seven-of-Nine, I must charge it every day. It's painful; metal and flesh don't like each other. Their co-existence is a brutal dance of willpower, always racking toward the apparatus. It's a frightful existence, always skimming along on the razor's edge, straining my capability. One step to either flank, and I may bear headlong into despair's abyss.

I'm thankful that most people have no idea about the constant physical pain of cold foreign objects integrated into a body and how they can be devastating to flesh, frame, and mind. Pain medication is essential but not guaranteed. When pain overwhelms me, the elite's gilded rules deny relief, forcing me to transgress their boundaries. When the pain drowns me, I choose to walk in Strawberry Fields with the Walrus — a place of physical and mental respite — where the pain is numbed, pressed behind a mask of un-named mercies, the chaos stuffed in a box by the me who's tapping around at the back of my skull.

Since the abuse and over-prescribed pain meds by profit-seeking Pharma and Doctors, I am deprived by the wild swing of the pendulum controlled by selfish people who overreact to everything, addressing every issue with a sweeping generalization for the entire populace. Their motto is: pain for thee, but not for me. They take what they desire, enriching themselves by acting above the law meant for us commoners. Their reward, in the end, may be brutal. YHWH hates double weights and measures and thieves, yet I cling to his justice, flawed though I am.

Sometimes, I'd just like it to be over, praying to YHWH to end the misery, although I don't see myself ever assuming HIS role in this. I can suffer; I can endure until my future ends. I am Borg; Resistance to life is a futile exercise. I’m Blessed, and I write on.

—Noisy Wren