You're the Filter

Let the shouting sea summersault through you

Absorb the polluted, peculiar profusion of the possible

Percolate it into pellucid, purified poetry

No one else is shaped exactly like you

Configure the chaos; let it caress your contours and be curated

Distill it into a distinctive design that froths and foams through your form

For you have been forged by failure and frantic fumbling into this filter

Brackish bubbling buffoonery bombards you, insisting that it is normal

Allow its nebulous noise to nest in the modest music you are

Let its dull, desultory dripping distill it

Refine it to its ribald, robust essence

It soaks through everyone

What it becomes

How it is cleansed and concentrated

You alone will decide

So many have tried

To be someone else

Be still, yourself

Permit things to settle into your sincere, singular shape

Let it all pour into your patience

Being is a barrage: the barren and the barons, gods and dogs

It wants to flush through you, unchanged

Be just obstinate enough to slow it with sweet, saline or spicy subtlety

Do not worry about marking or modifying or mastering

What steams, scalding, through you

Simply being who and what is left of you

You are the gate everything must negotiate

Let them sip what gets through with wincing wonder