"What Scale Measures My Worth?" by Kaitlin Butler

---

Is it a car ride straight to the middle of nowhere

With someone basking in sunlight holding an unlit match

Waiting for me to say the wrong thing so they can burn their ties?

Or the voices that feed my innermost fears

Saying I am annoying, unappealing, needing to be fixed, 

And needing to fit their acceptance, because without it, what am I?

Stifling standards of affection drip from the mouths

of busted hearts held together by fool’s gold and string, waiting 

for someone to fix the same mess they inflict on those not yet scarred like them.

I can’t help but think my vision is skewed. That

Worth is supposed to be what He ingrained in me

To bring a smile to His face with every swoop of an eyelid

And every shutter of my voice from a heart 

that quakes for the lonely and the beauty of a gentle 

And quiet spirit that is worth loving despite my doubts it can be so, yet

I strip myself down to a mundane mix

Of people with hearts shredded as fine as mine and wonder why 

I can’t ever hear passed a cacophony of collaborative hate against me

and them for being the voices chanting my own fears.

I assume their cries rise from a superior place of confidence

And ignore the sparks building fires until corpses start burning a lot like theirs.

I’d rather be alive than cremated in a fire culture calls beautiful.