A Single Mistake Poem by Julia Luber

It almost feels like that one time you make a mistake, actually
exhausts all the perfection you so carefully masterminded before:
as if it all the trance in good and right existed only for a build up
for that one mistake to take more from you, to hurt more, to exploit
more of what good and right you've done.

It's like whomever and whatever benefits out of that one mistake,
gets to use layers and layers and exactitude and perfection all in its
brutal and unforgivable favor. As if all your right and good only existed
to reenforce and stregthen and empower whatever it is that benefits
from your mistakes.

That's what it feels like. Even once analyzed. Even once dissected.
That's how awful what is happening can be sometimes.
As if it all exists solely for what terror and evil benefits out of that
one awful and avoidable mistake. And that it was avoidable, that you
had even felt your mind go through some acrobatics at another point
in its prevention, that you knew you had to protect yourself against it:
makes it (the wrong)that much more empowered, that much more enabled,
that much more excruciating.

And it's over knowing that no, you can not afford to make even a single mistake.
Because you will lose all that you worked for before that.
And all the power of the good will be instantaneously vacuumed up
and exhausted and poisoned and contaminated by that benefitting evil.