Restricted Potential
The journey of life continues down one gigantic road.
Sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, sometimes even a pothole to trip us up.
I have traveled down the road for quite some time now.
It is apparent that the road I am traveling has been surrounded by a humongous chain-link fence.
Not a wall, but a fence which I can see through to the truth that lies beyond it.
Who put this fence up, and why?
Those responsible number the millions, if not more.
Society has placed this fence around my road, trapping me from roaming free.
It was placed in fear of true-expression emerging to blot the picture which we call “normal.”
Those who stay in this fence are being denied their potential.
These damn limitations are keeping me in, but do I dare do the inconceivable?
Do I dare to break the reality and smash down the fence, running off the road to a place in which I should be?
Do I dare to allow society’s fixed limits restrict all and everything in which I concern myself?
The real question here is: Should I have to be asking these questions in the first place?
There must be a fence somewhere, but it doesn’t need to be so close and so tall.
The fence is good enough to preserve our perfect image of what we should be, instead of what we want to be.
It is not fair that fear is driving us to what we call normal.
Isn’t that in itself unacceptable, since anything derived from fear isn’t normal? Only that which comes from the truth, that for some reason everyone has a problem with.
Those that have smashed down the fence are those that are “unacceptable.”
We live behind closed doors near roads with large fences.
If it never stops, we’ll just keep wondering about what could have been, instead of what we were forced to be.
Chris Loflin
1-7-96
I just realized I was a freshman when I started writing poems, not a sophomore like I had always remembered. Oh!
