I was constipated
the way a man is constipated
when he mistakes accumulation for worth.
Days of holding—
not food,
but judgments,
half-read arguments,
moral cautions sharpened into weapons
I never had the courage to use.
I told myself I was careful.
I was hoarding.
I told myself I was deep.
I was afraid of waste.
My mind became a colon of citations:
everything retained,
nothing digested,
ideas fossilized before they could nourish.
Even my virtues hardened—
ethics as impaction,
principle as obstruction.
I walked around like this for years
calling it scholarship,
calling it seriousness,
calling it faith.
Meanwhile the body kept score.
It always does.
It said: you cannot think your way
out of rot.
When it came, it was not catharsis.
No music.
No metaphor gentle enough to save me.
Just pain,
sweat,
the obscene knowledge
that what I had guarded
was shit.
And when it left me—
heavy, sour, undeniable—
I did not feel clean.
I felt exposed.
Because the relief revealed the lie:
I had believed retention was holiness,
that nothing passing through me
meant nothing could accuse me.
But what remains when nothing moves
is not purity.
It is decay with good posture.
I sit now in the aftermath,
emptier,
less impressive,
no longer armored by my own blockage.
My life is not fixed.
My mind is not redeemed.
My morals are still compromised—
but at least
they are moving again.
And maybe this is what repentance is:
not elevation,
not insight,
but the humiliating willingness
to let what is dead
leave you
before it poisons
everything else.
