Jeques’s Art Portfolio (page 10)

A free-spirited cub

Laid in the holy slab

Donned by my mother white.

A willing sacrificial lamb

To get the approval of my father.

 

He offered me in the altar

To fulfill his promise,

To pay his dues

And left me waif outside a shut door

Of a dome I didn’t belong.

 

He dropped me off the road, unknown.

To a journey never understood.

A life he ordered me to live

Without a map to follow,

And lost myself along the way.

 

I strayed into the wilderness,

Cruel and unforgiving,

Like a vulnerable cub

Bullied by laughing hyenas.

There was no armor

To shield me in the battles

I didn’t expect exist

Inside the dome

That I thought was holy.

I was an easy prey

To predators in school

And the obloquies of my father

When I returned home.

 

The life raft

I thought I could cling on

In times of storm

Pushed me away,

Drifting, hitting rocks in the shores

That would not welcome me.

I sustained wounds

That bleed from inside

Nobody understood

I leaked many years

In silence to healing ~

To nurse the white cub inside me

And make myself whole again.

 

 I was a reject at 13

A loser at such a young age.

A picture of defeat,

Expelled from the dome

That many thought

Would determine my future.

The once free-spirited cub

Suddenly became a pariah

Retiring to his dug burrow,

Leaving behind no egress,

Descending farther

Into the abyss.

 

I tried to mimic the hyenas

For awhile to earn my protection

From the harsh world.

A symbiosis I welcomed

Like the anemone

To a clownfish taking shelter

In its stinging tentacular folds

While I build my backbone,

Training my fins to swim

And find the lost me again.

 

 It was a moment

I’m not proud about, and remorseful.

I feel for the souls I stung with words,

For who could understand them better

But me who once was a dartboard

Of ridicules of the hyenas.

 

I’ve learned to sound like their laughter

But did not become one of them.

For inside me is a crying cub,

I heard clearly

When I chose solitude.

 

I didn’t belong to any herd

And refused to take their colors,

For I chose to become a new breed 

That grows its claws

Not to harm, but to protect.

To weave words not to destroy

But to re-build the broken spirits. 

 

 

It took me years to understand

Like the clownfish to survive

Free of my imaginary anemone.

It took me awhile to recognize

The true sound of my laughter

Muted by the loud hyenas.

 

In solitude I redeemed my voice

I once lost with my desperate attempts

To seek the approval of my father.

 

I swam the ocean, arrived in the shore 

That my creator intended me to be

And found the white cub still clad in white

His mother once donned him,

But now grown

And tamed.

"Tamed" oil on canvas by Jeques B. Jamora, 2004

 

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