FREEDOM
FREEDOM
PART 1
Freedom won by turning the mirror
to watch the thing behind me—
to finally walk into its own proportions,
survive its own weather,
wear its impossible shape—
and all without my hands to fix it.
There's a freedom
that comes as numbness comes—
as the body abandoning
a place it has been pierced too often,
and always without mercy.
And just before surrender,
one kept peeling back
what they thought was their own skin,
only to discover
they were wearing another season,
some other person's weather,
and carefully wore it upon the shoulders
until they forgot where they ended.
And in the freedom,
the flowers have not somehow transformed
but were always this bright.
And after the rain,
when the asters didn't deepen,
the creosote did not gather into
a new shade of green either.
It was my eyes all along
that finally stopped kneeling—
and simply looked.
And in seeing, the last tears
didn't dissolve into the ground—
They gathered in my palms
like little glass beads,
like ruin trying to return—
that no longer belonged
inside my skin—
⸻
PART 2
and behind me,
Pierrot had lived inside the act so long
it became his face.
The audience were all clowns.
Who knew?
I did.
Who knew carnival lights
were nailed to boards,
bright enough to fool the road,
and never the daylight.
Who knew?
I did.
Why linger?
There is freedom
in no longer asking the compass.
The compass only lands
on an idea of a place
no longer existing
for me.
I was the one
walking circles around it,
calling it my journey.
There is freedom
when it finally stands
without asking
to look directly at itself.
Freedom
because I have stopped
erasing another person's outline.
My feelings inside
fractured—
river ice giving way—
one long interior sound,
then water
doing what it intended
all along.
And I no longer love the bird
kept in this house—
so I opened its window.
And I no longer wait
for a voice
that always belonged
somewhere else.
So the man-made prison burns.
And yet
not really gloriously.
No.
It blackened quietly,
moons ago—
beam by beam,
until dawn
could no longer remember
where to cast its shadow,
and only ash remained
with the shape
of what it once contained.
I turned the ashes over
until nothing remained.
Then wished
to become myself again.
The misfortune
of arriving
at the wrong fate
is sometimes
the only door
through which
the truth
at last
enters.
© Marni Fraser
0702.2026
[Ⅻ · 33]
Image | 2026
