I Don’t Write from the Heart

People say, “Write from the heart.”

Fuck the heart.
The heart is a liar.
The heart is weak.
The heart begs, pleads, and makes excuses for the same people who carved you up and smiled while doing it.

I used to write from the heart — when I still believed love meant shutting up.
When I thought pain was just the price you pay.
That if I bled enough, maybe someone would finally say,
“You’ve done enough. You can rest now.”

But no one ever said that.
They just let me bleed.

So no — I don’t write from the heart anymore.
I write from the soul.
And the soul is fucking tired.

The soul remembers everything.

It remembers being six years old, sitting in a McDonald’s parking lot, staring at that Power Wheels truck —
how I lit up, thinking, for once, maybe I mattered.
She said she’d bring it to Mamaw’s.
She never did.
She returned it.
It was all just for show.

I stopped asking after that.
Stopped hoping.
A piece of me froze right there, in that goddamn parking lot.

The soul remembers growing up hungry — not just for food, but for safety.
For someone who wouldn’t hurt me. Or walk away.

It remembers working at thirteen, dropping out at sixteen,
chasing money because love felt like the biggest risk of all.

It remembers the drugs — the way they filled the cracks, numbed the pain,
and how they almost swallowed me whole.

It remembers building something from nothing —
a business, a name, a purpose —
and then watching it all burn.

Not from laziness. Not from greed.
But from trust.
I trusted the wrong men, let wolves inside with my name on their contracts.
They turned.

They sued. They lied. They smeared my name across the news.
Suddenly, I was a villain in a story I didn’t write.
Suddenly, I was back in jail.

I remember the smell of that place.
The cold steel.
The birthdays that passed without a single call.
The time I sat there thinking, This is it. This is how they’ll remember me.
Fraud. Felon. Failure.

I remember missing my daughter growing up.
Missing her first steps, her birthdays, the small moments a father’s supposed to live for.
I remember thinking, Even if I survive this, I’ll never get that back.

The soul remembers holding a woman while she cried, while she broke,
while her mind slipped away —
and still somehow believing loving her meant staying.

The soul remembers silence.
Not the peaceful kind —
the kind that follows betrayal.
The kind where your body shakes, and your mouth won’t work
because you never expected the knife to come from them.

The soul remembers every time I begged God not to take me before I could fix it.
Every time I thought I’d healed —
then PTSD crawled out from under the floorboards and reminded me I hadn’t.

I write from the place that won’t let me lie.
That won’t let me pretend I’m okay when I’m breaking.
That won’t let me forget the smell of floodwater
or the sound of a judge reading charges that weren’t mine
but were stapled to my name anyway.

I’ve been good at a lot of things.
But never great at any of them.
Always falling short. Always failing.

Except this.

Writing is the one thing I can’t fail at.
It’s not about glory or fame.
It’s about survival.

I write to survive.
And I write to inspire —
so others can learn from my pain without falling the same way.

Every sentence I get out is one less memory rotting in the dark.

I don’t write from the heart — that’s where the mask lives.
That’s where the preacher in me used to hide behind big words and bigger promises.

The soul doesn’t do that.
The soul rips the bandage off and shows you the wound.
The soul remembers exactly how it happened.
And it dares you to look away.

So if you feel something when you read me —
know that’s not poetry.
It’s scar tissue.
It’s the sound of a man who died and came back. Six times.

I don’t write because I want to.
I write because I have to.

Because if I keep all this in —
it’ll fucking kill me.