Buckets (Poem)

You…. were born with buckets.
 
Not the kind of buckets that hold water, but the kind of buckets that reside inside, and hold the things you hate about yourself.

You carry these buckets, and you try not to let them fill, and you try not to let them spill.
 
If they spill, you’ve got a mess on your hands.
Mostly because you hardly ever spill just one bucket. Usually, one mess leads to another.
 
You can’t put any of your buckets down. That’s not the way it works.
If you could, you would have left them long ago.
If you could, you never would have picked them up.
But you couldn’t help it.
You were born with your buckets attached by emotions you wouldn’t understand until years later. Sometimes decades.
 
Most of your buckets are carried within.
All of them see the light of day from time to time.
That’s usually when a bucket gets too full, and spills over. Which usually incites others to spill, as you struggle and grasp and desperately try to keep the mess from becoming too much of a mess, before you can’t manage the mess.
 
So you carry the weight of your buckets, lifting them, balancing them, every step, every day.
It’s a weight that makes your head hurt, your shoulders tired, and your back sore.
Even when you lie down, sometimes especially when you lie down, the weight is upon you.
Sometimes, it won’t let you sleep, because when you lie down, you have nothing else to think about, and when you have nothing else to think about, you have too much to think about, and the buckets fill faster.
 
So every day you carry your buckets. And every day you remind yourself that no one wants to hear about your buckets and how heavy they are.

And every day you want to tell someone, or vent to someone, or scream to the world how tired you are from these God Damn buckets you were born to carry while others weren’t.
 
You can tell some people.
But you can’t tell them too often, or they’ll get tired of hearing about your buckets.
So you do your screaming and you do your crying on the inside, and sometimes that spills to the outside, but that’s okay.
As long as it’s just sometimes.
Because life goes on, and you still have to figure it out, while not letting your buckets spill.

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