“I’m skinny but a little fluffy too,

Soft where I’d like to be sharper.”

Baby, you’ll learn soon the world will whittle you down

To razor-thin edges and angles that cut like teeth.

You’ll learn soon that one of the rarest things is softness:

A look, a feeling that’s not ugly or unwantable like you think,

You just don’t see it anymore because it gets killed in the shadows.

Why wish away something that’s wanted

Like the great revolutionaries through history,

For their dangerous, change-making, radical love?

Your softness doesn’t fit into the steely boxes of this hive,

But what would it mean to fit?

To be the sharp, hard, jagged statue that’s been chiseled into your psyche?

It’s not that softness melts, wells up, blubbers in a world like this—

It’s that it fills the corners that they can’t touch,

Brings warmth into spaces they’d rather hammer into. 

So before you convince yourself you should be tighter, leaner, harder,

Colder,

Remember that maybe you remind them of the way candlelight spreads softly in the dark,

Or the way the pillow of an embrace turns restlessness into dreams,

And they can’t have that

Because they need to build their world on bones that are steely beams.