We’ve grown up with the likes of Maya Angelou and Shel Silverstein filling our minds with reminders of the strong people we should strive to be and forming our thoughts to be full of imagination and dreams.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve started to add yet another name to that list of poets and writers and songbirds who force me to see life in a different way – whose words nestle their way into my heart and create a whole new world than the one we’re living in.
R. M. Drake has quickly filled my Instagram timeline and Twitter feed as his short, powerful poems spread like wildfire. The self-published writer who has over 1 million followers uses writing as a form of self-therapy and as I’ve scrolled through his endless poems, set in typewriter font on a simple grey piece of paper, I can safely say they’ve been a form of therapy for me as well.
His words leave me breathless. They leave me wondering. They leave me questioning. They leave me genuinely gaining a new perspective on life and society. They leave me wanting more.
Just take a look for yourself.
I don’t know about you, but this left me in awe. I’ve never thought about it in such a way before – that maybe this emptiness, this void, is brought on by our own doing. We tend to love those who come into our lives and make us feel things we’ve never felt and maybe we love them so hard we end up leaving pieces of ourselves with them when we leave.
Stab me in the heart. This one hit me harder than it probably should, but nonetheless, its message still rings true. Relationships aren’t always going to work out. It’s just how life is. But that relationship, somewhere along the way, taught you how to be okay with loving someone fiercely and it will surely teach you how to open your heart to someone again even when you thought you never would be able to.
A lesson it took me years to learn and R.M. Drake has summed it up in just 28 words – everything that hurt us, everything that left us feeling broken, everything that made us question something, has made us and shaped us and guided us into the person we are today. I’ll be the first to say that some things really do just suck. Plain and simple, and I will never understand why I needed to go through them, but looking back now, I know I wouldn’t be the same person I am now if none of it would have happened, and for that, I am thankful.
He may not be as popular as Langston Hughes or Tyler Knott Gregson just yet, but R.M. Drake, with his powerful words and inspiring messages is well on his way.
Featured Image via R.M. Drake.
