Prompted Poem: Expectations

I was supposed to be

so many things,

so many people.

Perhaps if I'd been

melted down and poured,

with unerring precision,

by a deft and deliberate hand,

I'd have fit into the mold.

Some steely stubbornness

beyond my reckoning

refused to relinquish its solid state.

I've hated it for most of my life,

how I wish I could have behaved.

How many tears,

and how many lives, might I have saved?

The road behind me appears to be paved

with the gravely misshapen shards

of a shattered promise,

but that projection from

an outside world is only illusion. I am free

now, to decide what I expect of me.